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.

If you’re a Necessary LP, this quarter’s report is a little delayed but full of good news. Keep an eye out for it coming soon!

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’s aim is both sustainability and high performance.

| Manufacturing Engineer |

Forage: Create a unified API that helps low-income Americans buy online groceries. It’s Stripe, but for Electronic Benefits Transfer.

| Full Stack Software Engineer |

Reach out with any questions! All 136 open job postings are listed here.

Good Reads 📖

For the rushed reader …

Florida will soon be home to the world’s largest 3D-printed building: a 10,678 square-foot barn developed by Printed Farms.
Fractyl Health is developing a one-time gene therapy to end the weekly injections required by type 2 diabetes weight control drugs.
S&P Global reported fintech funding is down 49% year over year, and round values declined for both early stage and mature startups.
Elon Musk recently announced he will be developing a new company, xAI, which will create its own (not politically correct) language model, fed with Tesla driving data and public tweets among other training content.
The much anticipated Oppenheimer movie hits theaters July 21st, but Christopher Nolan hopes it has an impact on the Valley too.

For the less rushed reader …

Time to park your high horse in a 3D-printed horse barn. Although Florida is certainly a dark horse in the climate race, it will soon be home to the world’s largest 3D-printed building: a 10,678 square-foot barn developed by Printed Farms. 3D-printing could be instrumental to waste reduction efforts, with the potential to limit construction waste tenfold and decrease carbon emissions by up to 70%.

One-hit wonders might be the worst nightmares of pop stars, but not biotech scientists. Individuals with diabetes typically self-administer treatment monthly or even daily, which leads to one major problem: people stop taking their medication. Fractyl Health is developing a one-time gene therapy to end weekly injections required by type 2 diabetes weight control drugs. The company intends to deliver an artificial gene to the pancreas via inactivated viruses to stimulate continuous production of the key hormone, GLP-1. Only time will tell if this shot in the dark can shine a light on diabetes research.

Someone wake up sleeping beauty, and while you’re at it, maybe pour some cold water on fintech funding too. S&P Global reported fintech funding is down 49% year over year, and round values declined for both early stage and mature startups. Companies are pulling back as well — the first half of 2023 saw a 64% drop in the number of investments made compared to the same period last year. For companies founded on green, they’re becoming quite hard-pressed for cash.

X marks the spot … and Elon Musk’s latest passion project. Musk recently announced he will be developing a new company, xAI, which will create its own (not politically correct) language model, fed with Tesla driving data and public tweets among other training content. Musk revealed that the new company will collaborate with Tesla on both silicon and AI software fronts. The AI model will be “maximally curious,” much like I’m sure many readers are now.
Abandon hope all ye who enter here, according to Christopher Nolan. The much anticipated Oppenheimer movie hits theaters July 21st, but Nolan hopes it has an impact on the Valley too. The famous director took a stance on AI’s intersection with defense, proclaiming, “[Algorithms] applied to AI? That’s a terrifying possibility. Terrifying. Not least because as AI systems go into the defense infrastructure, ultimately they’ll be charged with nuclear weapons, and if we allow people to say that that’s a separate entity from the person who’s wielding, programming, putting AI into use, then we’re doomed. It has to be about accountability.” Powerful words, Nolan.

Take a Peak in the Portfolio 📂

From digging to digits, farmers need tech too. Charles Baron, co-founder and CMO of Necessary Ventures’ portfolio company Farmers Business Network (FBN), hopped on TechCrunch’s podcast Found to talk about the agtech space. Since its founding in 2014, FBN has already expanded across multiple verticals, from its May launch of an AI advisor for farmers to its brand new research tool for gathering information on agricultural land.

Check the podcast out here.

StartUp, GlowUp 🔥

Notable startup updates in …

Climatetech

Isometric - A startup to offset carbon offsets

The Problem: Carbon offsets lack scientific rigor and transparency, leading to greenwashing.
The Tech: An independent, transparent registry for carbon removal
Recently Raised: $25 million in one of the largest-ever seed rounds for climate software, backed by Lowercarbon Capital and Plural
Also Note: Founder Eamon Jubbawy is a rockstar. He previously co-founded Onfido, a highly successful AI-powered ID verification startup.

Healthtech

Herself Health - Golden healthcare for golden women

The Problem: Women feel unheard and underserved, and older women have unique issues that need to be and feel like a priority.
The Tech: Care focused on women aged 65 and older, currently operating one clinic in St. Paul, Minnesota
Recently Raised: $26 million in Series A funding led by Michael Cline of Accretive
Also Note: During research, the startup observed women are less likely to receive a chronic heart disease or stroke diagnosis and therefore do not receive proper treatment.

Causaly - Drug discovery the right w(AI)y

The Problem: Traditional biomedical research and discovery is a heavily manual process.
The Tech: A knowledge graph integrated with generative AI to enable biomedical researchers to synthesize prior research and uncover new insights
Recently Raised: $60 million in Series B funding led by ICONIQ Growth
Also Note: The startup already counts 12 of the top 20 pharmaceutical companies among its customers.

FINTECH

Mattilda - Getting private schools’ money under control

The Problem: Schools need a better way to predict cash flow, and parents need a better way to pay.
The Tech: An end-to-end collections management platform for schools providing a variety of payment options
Recently Raised: $19 million in Series A funding led by GSV Ventures
Also Note: The company formed an exclusive commercial alliance with Santillana, Latin America’s largest academic content platform servicing over 2 million students.

CapStack - On a bank in the sun

The Problem: Banks are islands; they operate without connectivity or a way to diversify capital sources.
The Tech: An integrated operating system for banks that de-risks portfolios
Recently Raised: $6 million in seed funding led by Fin Capital
Also Note: Over 60 banks agreed to join the platform before the first line of code was ever written.

EDTECH

Kahoot - Education is a game

The Problem: Education is more effective when it’s engaging and social.
The Tech: A software platform enabling users to play and create quizzes for educational purposes
Recently Raised: $1.72 billion offered by an investor consortium led by Goldman Sachs to acquire Kahoot
Also Note: The company partnered with General Atlantic in late 2022 and has since scaled its enterprise offering and global subscriber base, expanding beyond the education sector.

TECHBITS

Vellum.ai - Engineers need to be more promptful

The Problem: Prompting LLMs is tedious, and there’s no way to measure the quality of prompts.
The Tech: A tool that enables AI prompters to compare model output side-by-side and search for company-specific data for particular prompts.
Recently Raised: $5 million in seed funding, including participation from Rebel Fund, Eastlink Capital, Pioneer Fund, and Y Combinator
Also Note: The company has observed revenue increases by around 25% to 30% per month.

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:

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Thanks for reading, and see you next week!

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