Mega Days at Microsoft & Pre-Seed Updates
Necessary Nuggets
Happy Wednesday! 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.
| Test Engineer |
Forage: Create a unified API that helps low-income Americans buy online groceries. It’s Stripe, but for Electronic Benefits Transfer.
| Security Software Engineer |
Reach out with any questions! All 141 open job postings are listed here.
The New Batch 🐔
The saying goes that “people make the place,” but where are the right people?
At Necessary Ventures, we know that talent is distributed across the globe, but opportunity is not. We're excited to share our preferred partnership with Assembly Industries, which provides access to management consulting level talent, vetted for strong critical thinking and communication skills, at an exclusive price of only $1,600/month. While originally only for our portfolio companies, we have seen strong enough results to share with you as well.
Companies are using Assembly across sales, marketing, project management, account management, customer success, operations, and finance. See talent here that you can hire today. Extending this preferred pricing is one way we're saying thank you for being a part of our community, just be sure to mention Necessary in your onboarding.
Market Stirrings 🚩
Early stages of VC are seeing some market growth. Pre-seed pre-money valuations grew consistently from 2017 to 2022. For the first half of 2023, the top decile is down, but all other data points are the same or slightly higher compared to last year. Check it out:
Good Reads 📖
For the rushed reader …
OpenAI’s board dismissed Sam Altman as CEO. Barely 3 days later, he announced his new role leading a "new advanced AI research team” at Microsoft.
Microsoft unveiled two new AI chips at the Ignite conference in Seattle, which could result in a head-to-head battle with Nvidia and Intel.
An emerging industry called agrivoltaics combines solar energy production with agricultural activities like sheep grazing, beekeeping, and crop growing to maximize land usage.
There’s fresh capital in the pre-seed market. New York-based VC firm Twelve Below closed on $108 million in commitments.
For the less rushed reader …
MICROSOFT SWOOPED IN: In case you haven’t seen the headlines, OpenAI’s board dismissed Sam Altman as CEO. Barely 3 days later, he announced his new role leading a "new advanced AI research team” at Microsoft. The saga goes like this: Ilya Sutskever, chief scientist at OpenAI and a co-founder, reached out to Altman last Thursday night to schedule a call on Friday afternoon; Altman was fired; co-founder Greg Brockman was demoted from chairman on the board but would retain his role as President; Brockman resigned; three senior OpenAI researchers resigned; Twitch co-founder Emmett Shear is appointed interim CEO at OpenAI; Altman, Brockman, and colleagues announce they will lead the new AI research team at Microsoft. Altman and the OpenAI board continue to discuss a potential return. And the crowd is on the edge of their seats with bated breath.
ChatGPT is shaking in its bits:
MICROSOFT GOT BUSY: Microsoft is shaking the chip off its shoulder and sending it right into the AI world. Prior to the dramatic OpenAI shakeup, Microsoft unveiled two new AI chips at the Ignite conference in Seattle, which could result in a head-to-head with Nvidia and Intel. These are the first chips designed by Microsoft for its cloud infrastructure. The potential impact for Microsoft is huge: in the past, Microsoft-backed OpenAI trained models on Nvidia GPUs in Azure, but the new chips could cut out this hefty cost. Microsoft is currently testing how its new chips hold up to processing OpenAI’s GPT 3.5-Turbo, along with other AI programs.
INDUSTRY WATCH: There’s a new industry in town, but it’s a little sheepish. An emerging industry called agrivoltaics combines solar energy production with agricultural activities like sheep grazing, beekeeping, and crop growing to maximize land usage. In the words of Hannah Montana, “it’s the best of both worlds.” Farmers carry on farming; solar developers gain access to new land for producing clean electricity. Agricultural land makes up 44% of the total land area in the U.S., which makes this compromise vital to meeting decarbonization goals.
PRE-SEED FUNDING: No cap - there’s fresh capital in the pre-seed market. New York-based VC firm Twelve Below closed on $108 million in commitments. Twelve Below focuses on pre-seed and seed companies and is known for taking an “old-school” approach to investing: small fund sizes, high conviction, high ownership, low number of investments. Twelve Below invests across fintech, healthcare, energy, SMB, and consumer sectors. Looks like founders have another chance to collect some pre-seeds before the long, cold winter.
Fire Up the Pre-Seeds🔥
Notable pre-seed raises in …
healthtech
BioPhy - Making drugs is easy
The Problem: Clinical trial outcomes are difficult to predict and achieving desired outcomes becomes costly for pharmaceutical firms.
The Tech: An AI platform that predicts clinical trial outcomes with over 80% accuracy and increases the speed of drug development by up to 100%.
Recently Raised: $4.5 million led by Metrodora Ventures, Chelsea Clinton’s VC firm.
Also Note: CEO Dave Lawtshaw II, PhD co-founded the firm after leading Johnson & Johnson's AI drug development program for six years.
Fintech
Scalestack - Time to set sale
The Problem: The targeting stage in current sales tech is under-developed and unhelpful.
The Tech: An AI-powered platform that customizes and automates workflows with internal and external data, producing hundreds of sales leads.
Recently Raised: $1 million in funding with participation from Ripple Ventures, Forum Ventures, Flyer One Ventures, Founders Network Fund, and others.
Also Note: Sales reps today spend 72% of their time on non-sales tasks (manual research, data entry, etc.).
other tech
Orbit Technologies - This tech is electric
The Problem: Virtual reality is due for another upgrade. Why just see it when you could feel it?
The Tech: Non-invasive brain-computer interfaces that create hyper-immersive illusions of movement to enhance gaming and virtual reality.
Recently Raised: $500k in funding led by Dune VC.
Also Note: The tech sends electrical signals to the movement centers of people’s brains.
Outro🚪
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Thanks for reading, and see you next week!
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