A dangerous data world needs trust & safety
Necessary Nuggets
Happy Wednesday! If you’re new here, welcome to Necessary Nuggets, your one-stop pre-seed shop. We deliver updates from Necessary Ventures and helpful tidbits on our little corner of the world. Every edition is also on our blog.
Jobortunities 🚨
✨NEW FEATURED ROLE✨
Necessary Ventures: If you love this newsletter, we think you might like investing in what the world needs too. We have full-time and part-time opportunities to think early stage and have an impact on solving founders’ problems.
| Investor |
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. Arc is currently accepting internship applications, so go ahead and forward this to every engineering student you know.
Reach out with any questions! All 166 open job postings are listed here.
Market Stirrings 🚩
Trust is the cornerstone of all healthy relationships, and startup founders are jumping on board. Generative AI’s explosion sparked the creation of a new sector in tech, trust and safety, and it’s forming the foundation for many new startups in the AI space. Trust and safety tech has received a steadily increasing amount of VC deal activity since 2019, most notably in deal value. From where we sit, fintech and edtech have received the loudest buzz as potential use cases to date, but PitchBook cited a wide range of additional applications for trust and safety (e.g., collaborative platforms and online marketplaces).
Good Reads 📖
For the rushed reader …
People are still worried AI will devour whole job categories, with forecasts claiming 40% of global workers will be exposed to AI in the workforce (60% in advanced economies).
MIT chemical engineers discovered a way to more efficiently convert carbon dioxide to useful chemical compounds using DNA.
In a proposed class action settlement, Google agreed to destroy or de-identify billions of data records collected from users’ beloved “Incognito Mode” sessions.
For the less rushed reader …
BURGLAR IN THE N(AI)GHT: Do you wake up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night, wondering if your job will still be around in the morning? If yes, that makes you and the 50 other robots with big interviews in the morning (kidding, kind of). People are still worried AI will devour whole job categories, with forecasts claiming 40% of global workers will be exposed to AI in the workforce (60% in advanced economies). This fear could be unfounded according to one recent study from a job market researcher/blogger. According to his analysis of Upwork data, the largest declines since November 2022 for freelance jobs were in writing, translation, and customer service, but other categories were relatively unimpacted. The study concedes that freelance workers are more likely to see a hit from AI first compared to large companies with slower adoption. Nonetheless, large companies are making their first moves; Walmart rolled out a genAI tool called “My Assistant” to employees. Companies maintain the view that AI is a collaborative partner meant to augment skilled workers’ day-to-days rather than consume their roles – however, the definition of “skilled worker” might change. Who knew employers liked chatty employees, like ChatGPT, so much?
ROCKING A NEW PAIR OF GENES: MIT researchers went back in time to learn the alphabet for this discovery – well, at least four letters of it. MIT chemical engineers discovered a way to more efficiently convert carbon dioxide to useful chemical compounds using DNA. When scaled up, this would be instrumental in decarbonizing power plants and other sources that emit high amounts of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. Better yet, it would turn a profit in the process. Ariel Furst, assistant professor and senior author of the study, recently started a company called Helix Carbon to further develop the technology. Here’s to hoping Furst and Helix Carbon can crack the CO2de.
NO MORE DATA DIARIES: Invisibility cloaks only exist in Harry Potter. In a proposed class action settlement, Google agreed to destroy or de-identify billions of data records collected from users’ beloved “Incognito Mode” sessions. The settlement also mandates more disclosure from the big tech company about how it collects information and where it all goes — a fate that I’m sure is difficult for Google to chew-gle. Although the settlement is valued at $5 billion, those involved aren’t receiving any cash from the deed, only the lifelong satisfaction of data security. Google has already begun rolling out disclosures on the limits of its private browsing services and will continue to do so as part of the agreement. Big data will no longer keep big secrets, at least in Google’s hidden hand.
Fire Up the Pre-Seeds🔥
Notable pre-seed raises in …
healthtech
Century Health - Century-loads of data
The Problem: Innovation in healthtech is bogged down by limited access to high-quality patient data.
The Tech: A platform that leverages generative AI to extract hidden data on approved drugs and aggregate it.
Recently Raised: $2 million in funding led by 2048 Ventures.
Also Note: The company uses a subscription model to give researchers and pharma companies access to better data.
artificial intelligence
Kidsy - Spend a tid on kids
The Problem: Raising kids is expensive. Parents feed into a never ending cycle of buy and give/throw away.
The Tech: An e-commerce program that partners with large brands to give parents access to discounted items while reducing overstock.
Recently Raised: $1 million in funding led by Impellent Ventures and its partners David Brown, Phil Beauregard, and Tariq Trotter.
Also Note: The startup focuses on a broad product line beyond clothes, also offering strollers, car seats, toys, travel gear, etc.
Outro🚪
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