The simulation is real.

Necessary Nuggets

Happy Tech Tuesday! If you’re new here, welcome to Necessary Nuggets. We deliver exciting updates from Necessary Ventures and some helpful tidbits on the tech world to you bimonthly. Every edition is also on our blog.

JOBORTUNITIES 🚨

Taro: No fuss healthcare. Patients get help without the stress. Taro increases access to healthcare while reducing costs and physician burnout. 

| Product engineer |

Arc Boats: Electrify watercraft. Build the Tesla of boats. Arc boats’ aim is both sustainability and high performance. 

| Manufacturing Engineer |

Wayve: The first company in the world to introduce autonomous vehicles to public roads. Wayve sits at the forefront of self-driving, developing cars that experience and learn from data.

| Machine Learning Engineer |


Reach out with any questions! All 190 open job postings are listed here.

GOOD READS 📖

Our favorite stories in…

Climatetech

  • Why not trade your morning Starbucks for a Tesla instead? Tesla prices are plummeting as the company engages in price wars to scale its operations and produce more vehicles. Tesla is shooting for 1.8 million vehicles in 2023.

  • An Oregon energy bill has been #rejected. The bill sought to curb the carbon output of data centers and cryptocurrency miners, but Amazon stopped the bill with aggressive lobbying.

Edtech

  • You’ve probably heard of Zoom, but have you heard of Metaversity? Marketers aren’t the only ones magnetized by the metaverse during this tech slowdown. Educators are investigating digital twinning for physical universities.

Fintech

  • Is Current out of touch with its current employees? Current, a NYC-based neobank valued at $2.2 billion in its last round, is being sued by its ex-head of talent for discrimination. 

Healthtech

  • Let’s talk about “techquity.” Healthtech has the potential to bridge systemic gaps in healthcare by connecting and aligning various stakeholder groups. What will a platform revolution look like in healthcare?

  • 3D images of breasts. Now that I have your attention, 3d-imaging and AI are joining forces to improve diagnostics for kidney disease and breast cancer. 

Techbits

  • Virgin Orbit succumbed to the funding winter. The company declared it will cease operations for the foreseeable future and lay off approximately 85% of its workforce.

  • Everything in moderation? Stanford research revealed that GPT-3 released 502 metric tons of carbon during training, consuming enough energy to power a home for hundreds of years.

  • Q1 is done, and venture funding is down bad (down 53% year over year compared to Q1 2022, to be specific).

  • Do you have experience programming English? Maybe prompt engineering is for you.

  • There may be an Alibaba/OpenAI showdown on the hor(AI)zon. Alibaba just released a ChatGPT alternative.

Stop missing academia – read a research paper 🤖


As it turns out, The Sims was ahead of its time. This paper is the definition of what happens when Google and Stanford researchers get bored. Experimenters created “generative agents” that simulate human behavior in a believable, albeit uncanny, way. They eat, sleep, converse, form opinions, and even throw Valentine’s day parties. 

If you thought ChatGPT was cool; this is ChatGPT if it was struck by lightning and spontaneously transformed into a next-level lifeform. These Generative Agents are built from similar large language models, but instead of existing as one God-like observer like ChatGPT, they feed off each other. Maybe conspiracy theorists were right to say we might be living in a simulation.

StartUp, GlowUp 🔥

Our favorite startup stories in…

Climatetech

  • GaeaStar - Dirty hands with every sip

    • The problem they’re solving: Disposable products are an environmental nightmare

    • Business process: Disposable cups and bowls made from clay that disintegrate back into the earth where they came from

    • Recent raise: $6.5 million seed funding

    • Gaining Steam: An upcoming trial in the U.S. with Verve, a California coffee chain

  • Carbonwave - Where you seaweed, use weed

    • The problem they’re solving: Sargassum blooms (massive mats of seaweed) threaten local ecology and increase the pace of global warming

    • Business process: Biomaterials made from Sargassum, including emulsifiers, textiles, and plastics 

    • Recent raise: $5 million Series A funding led by Mirova’s Sustainable Ocean Fund

    • Its edge: A unique extraction process making it the first company in the world to produce a wide range of Sargassum-based biomaterials

Healthtech

  • Felix&Fido - Telemedicine for terriers

    • Problem they’re solving: Pet care is outdated

    • Business process: Subscription-based service offering telemedicine, in-clinic, and at-home care packaged into one membership

    • Recent raise: $4 million pre-seed funding led by PSL Ventures and Rover

    • Market: Mars Veterinary Health reported that the pet industry needs 41,000 more vets by 2030 to meet demand.

Fintech

  • Frank - Financial aid fraudster

    • Problem they claimed to solve: Most students have debt, and few know how to manage it

    • Business process: A financial platform to help college students organize their finances, including financial aid and loans

    • Negative press: The SEC charged founder Charlie Javice with fraud during the 2021 sale of the company to JPMorgan Chase Bank for $175 million.

  • Acorns - Round up, wealth up

    • Problem they’re solving: Saving money should be simple

    • Business process: A platform that rounds up your purchases and automatically invests the change

    • Recent activity: Acorns acquired GoHenry, a kid-focused digital banking platform.

    • Context: Acorns and GoHenry have been in talks since 2021.

AI

  • Fixie - Not so secret agents

    • The problem they’re solving: Integrating LLMs can be complicated, and businesses don’t know where to start

    • The tech: LLM-powered agents that can be built by anyone and run anywhere

    • Recent raise: $17 million pre-seed/seed funding 

    • Gaining Steam: 5,000 users in an early access program and a recent public launch

    • Founder highlights: Former engineering heads at Apple and Google

OUTRO

Feel free to reply to this email with all questions, feedback, or comments. We’ll be iterating and curating the NVTC newsletter according to your interests. 

Some last matters of business: 

  • If you’re a technologist (engineer or product manager / designer with a technical background) join us on the NVTC LinkedIn group if you haven’t. We’d love to have you! 

  • Sign up here if you’re interested in co-investing with Necessary.

If you’re a startup founder, we’d love to help where we can! Brex provides full-stack finance solutions for startups. Sign up via Necessary and get bonus points.

Thanks for reading, and see you next week!


© 2023 Necessary Ventures

San Francisco, California


Kaley UbellackerComment