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: Taro increases access to healthcare while reducing costs and physician burnout via direct primary care based health insurance.

| Product engineer |

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

| Manufacturing Engineer |

Moov: A marketplace for used semiconductor equipment. Over $3.7 billion in total value of equipment.

| Senior Full Stack Software Engineer |

Reach out with any questions! All 155 open job postings are listed here.

GOOD READS 📖

Our favorite stories in…

Heigh-ho – it’s off to work Elon Musk goes (shocker). Tesla plans to build a $375 million lithium refinery in Corpus Christi to supply its batteries.
Finance bros unite. 👊 A new coalition called the VC Alliance, including over 20 VC firms, launched with its eye on one prize: climate tech.

Interest rates are rising, and fintech startups are playing ball by offering a new product straight out of left yield. Silicon Valley companies are taking advantage of the uncertain economic environment with flashy high yield savings accounts.

NV portfolio company Recursion Pharmaceuticals is on the move. Always a biology-first company, Recursion is seeking out new pathways to test its tools by acquiring two Canada-based AI startups.
Is no one afraid of dying anymore? Medtech funding is waning in favor of trendier, fast-paced projects.

DeepFloyd might not have anything to do with the legendary band, but it still rocks. DeepFloyd unveiled IF, a text-to-image generative AI model that can depict text in images – an age-old struggle of AI.
Big news from a friendly f(AI)ce: Hugging Face and ServiceNow’s R&D division released StarCoder, a free generative AI system for coding poised to compete with GitHub’s Copilot.
The EU has taken up arms pens against AI, but it’s just the beginning.
Just because AV talk is quieter doesn’t mean the hype is dead. Capital is still flowing towards companies pursuing driverless tech.
Interviews can be scarier than a first date. Startup Yoodli is building a generative-AI-powered speech analysis tool for better practice.

AI you — try to keep up!

AI works hard, but humans work harder. The pace of AI advancements is thrilling but keeping track is starting to feel like connecting the dots on a crime board with a heap of strings and scrap paper. Here are some extra nuggets we’ve added to our board over the past couple weeks:

Apple hobbled into AI. Although Apple has been an old slowpoke on the AI front, it finally made its debut with a paid AI-powered health coach.

Replit boosted to unicorn status. Replit is building a generative AI tool for coding (yes, another GitHub Copilot alternative). The company raised almost $100 million at a $1.16 billion post-money valuation.

Cue the Auto-GPT craze. Auto-GPT is a new, independently developed application of OpenAI’s models that can “autonomously” perform tasks online.

Yelp wants in on the A(I)ction. Yelp introduced a series of updates that will create an AI-powered search experience, highlighting helpful information from reviews and providing search snippets.

The clock is ticking for TikTok. Tiktok is due to launch generative AI avatars.

Don’t forget to pick up ChatGPT from the kennel. Boston Dynamics integrated ChatGPT into its robodogs to enhance automated missions.

STARTUP, GLOWUP 🔥

Our favorite startup stories …

Frontline Wildfire Defense - Fight fire with fire apps

The Problem: The danger of wildfires is spreading like, well, a wildfire. We need better defense against them.
The Tech: An app that tracks wildfires, remotely activates sprinkler systems, and provides data to insurers
Recently Raised: $6.4 million in seed funding led by Echelon
Also Note: Xprize recently posted an $11 million wildfire tech competition

Hydrosat - Thirsty earth, thirsty satellites

The Problem: Precision agriculture needs more data, especially for tracking water
The Tech: Irrigation management solutions and a 16-satellite constellation that provides constant high-res images for agribusiness
Recently Raised: $20 million in Series A funding led by Statkraft Ventures
Also Note: Its first satellites are due to launch next year

Liquido - The Stripe of LatAm

The Problem: Digital payments have become the standard, but different geographies have different digital payment needs.
The Tech: Infrastructure to modernize payments access for Latin American businesses
Recently Raised: $26 million across 2 rounds in 2021 led by Index Ventures. The company just emerged from stealth mode with its next-gen platform.
Also Note: Only 28% of people in Latin America have credit cards.

Green-Got - Keep your money green

The Problem: Big retail banks invest in corporations that finance fossil fuel projects.
The Tech: A neobank just like traditional banks, minus the large emissions of greenhouse gases. Somewhere to secure your money and monitor your carbon footprint with every purchase.
Recently Raised: $5.5 million led by Pale Blue Dot
Also Note: Green-Got makes donations to nonprofits based on interchange fees (a percentage of transaction fees for credit card purchases paid out to Green-Got).

Noah Medical - One word: Robolungs

The Problem: Clinical inefficiencies that force the dangerous question, “Can I treat this patient tomorrow?”
The Tech: A robotic arm that snakes through your lungs to look for cancer
Recently Raised: $150 million in Series B funding co-led by Softbank Vision Fund and Prosperity7 Ventures
Also Note: The company’s lung bronchoscopy device was cleared by the FDA for commercial use last month.

Abdera Therapeutics - Radical radiotherapy

The Problem: Tough-to-target solid tumors
The Tech: A unique kind of antibody aimed at new targets with low expression levels
Recently Raised: $142 million in combined Series A and Series B funding led by Versant Ventures, Amplitude Ventures, and venBio Partners
Also Note: Abdera Therapeutics has received endless preclinical hype and intends to send in an application for human trials sometime next year.

Campus.edu - Computer College

The Problem: Education is expensive. Students AND professors suffer as a result.
The Tech: The first fully accredited, national, online community college with a network of professors from leading universities
Recently Raised: $29 million in Series A funding led by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Discord founder Jason Citron
Also Note: The beta platform launched last year and currently has 800 students across 30 states and about 150 faculty

Outro

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Thanks for reading, and see you next week!

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