It's that deep.

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. 

🚨✨FEATURED✨🚨 Taro has a full-time, remote or hybrid opening for an experienced individual to lead aspects of its network. This is a tremendous opportunity for an eager professional to grow in healthtech and drive operations at an early stage company.

| Network |

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

| Full Stack Software Engineer |

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

| Mid Backend Engineer |


Reach out with any questions! All 159 open job postings are listed here.

Good Reads 📖

For the rushed reader …

  • Electric vehicle batteries and the clean energy transition depend on critical minerals, but the question of where to get them is flooded by a sea of controversy.

  • Shipping giant Maersk presented the first container vessel moved with green methanol.

  • DeepMind trained an AI that can predict DNA variations that are likely to cause disease.

  • Hong Kong-based crypto company Mixin was breached, and hackers stole about $200 million.

  • The U.S. Department of Justice accused Google of unlawfully monopolizing online search and search ads.

For the less rushed reader …

Who lives in a pineapple under the sea? I’m not sure if it's a sea sponge, but you might find some critical minerals. Electric vehicle batteries and the clean energy transition depend on critical minerals, but the question of where to get them is flooded by a sea of controversy. Current methods depend on terrestrial mining, which fuels known harms such as deforestation and child labor. One alternative is deep sea mining, which unlocks multiple unknowns from both a regulatory and ecological perspective. Despite these uncertainties, projects are well underway – the Metals Company led the charge on exploratory deep sea mining, finding that the global warming potential was generally 54%-70% lower.

Methanol might have been a colorless liquid before, but it’s certainly green now. Shipping giant Maersk presented the first container vessel moved with green methanol, an alternative that uses biomass or captured carbon and hydrogen from renewable power. The shipping industry accounts for 3% of global carbon emissions, which is about the same as major polluting countries. While this signals landmark (oceanmark?) progress in the clean energy transition, analysts are worried there might not be enough supply of green methanol to power Maersk and its competitors.

Google DeepMind is minding its own business with a new outlook on genetic diseases. DeepMind trained an AI that can predict DNA variations that are likely to cause disease. Originally a video-gaming platform, DeepMind first entered the biotech space with AlphaFold, which accomplished a tremendous medical feat by predicting the shape of proteins. Now that same little AlphaFold is all grown up. DeepMind fine-tuned the algorithm to predict misspellings in human DNA, dubbing it AlphaMissense. The goal is simple: if given a change in protein structure, the program should spit out an answer to the age-old (probably more narcissistic than survivalist) question: “Is this bad for humans?”

If you steal something you can’t see or touch, does that still make you a thief? I just want to give you some food for thought, while you consider how to handle this moral dilemma: Hong Kong-based crypto company Mixin was breached, and hackers stole about $200 million. Mixin is a decentralized exchange that allows users to transfer digital assets. This makes it all the more confusing that hackers were able to steal from its cloud database, given that it’s decentralized. This marks the biggest crypto heist since 2023 and does not bode well for an already fragile crypto ecosystem.

Google might be caught red-, yellow-, green-, AND blue-handed. The U.S. Department of Justice accused Google of unlawfully monopolizing online search and search ads. This is the exact ad campaign that grew Google to a $1.7 trillion company, and experts all agree the internet as we know it (well, at least how it’s run) is at stake. The case against Google focuses on how the company pays billions of dollars for exclusive agreements with phone makers and web browsers to let Google be the default search engine. Is Google’s mission to make information “universally accessible and useful” all a ruse?

 

Fire Up the Pre-Seeds🔥

Notable pre-seed raises in …

Climatetech

  • Treefera - Don’t just hug trees; map them

    • The Problem: To restore the planet, we first need to restore trust in the carbon market.

    • The Tech: An AI-powered data platform dedicated to accuracy, transparency, and efficiency in carbon offsets.

    • Recently Raised: $2.2 million led by Concept Ventures.

    • Also Note: Its secret formula is trees. Its AI algorithm maps over a trillion trees to deliver insights on tree health and CO2 sequestration to improve CO2 credits pricing.

Healthtech

  • Mavida Health - A mother-loving lifeline

    • The Problem: Mental health disorders are the leading cause of pregnancy-related deaths.

    • The Tech: A clinical care app offering specialty care, including one-on-one therapy, group therapy, family/couples counseling, and medical prescriptions.

    • Recently Raised: $1.5 million led by Lakehouse Ventures.

    • Also Note: The startup will use the funds to develop its product and build out its team, expecting 12-15 months of runway.

  • Simmunome - DDD: Double down on diseases

    • The Problem: The current approach to clinical trials produces low success rates at exorbitant costs.

    • The Tech: AI-driven software to predict whether drug candidates will succeed or fail in clinical trials.

    • Recently Raised: $2 million led by Theodorus Investment Funds.

    • Also Note: Many AI startups target the drug-molecule side of the equation; this startup focuses on disease biology.

EDTECH

  • Flowell - Coaches for coaches

    • The Problem: Health coaches are professionally isolated and struggle to run their businesses effectively. 

    • The Tech: A central platform providing comprehensive business courses, community events, and private and group coaching.

    • Recently Raised: $400k led by Startup Ignition Ventures.

    • Also Note: Flowell used the investment to bring on a full-time CTO, who will introduce premium features to further expand current product offerings.

  • Databits - Skill gaps are so last season

    • The Problem: As frontier technologies like AI take off, Latin America risks lagging behind.

    • The Tech: An online education platform offering individual courses and full-time programs to solve industry-related challenges in Latin America.

    • Recently Raised: $600k from a mix of institutional investors and family offices in Latin America.

    • Also Note: Databits participated in the WeXchange 2022 program, an IDB and Google Accelerator.

TECHBITS

  • ThinkMetal - Metal hardware made easy

    • The Problem: Producing hardware is a time-consuming process, and 3D printers are expensive.

    • The Tech: A compact metal 3D printer that prints metal parts in less time than current products at a lower cost.

    • Recently Raised: $300k led by 100X.VC.

    • Also Note: The startup will use the new funds to expand and develop end-to-end solutions for 3D-printing.

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