Startups fueling around 🔋

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 🚨

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 |

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

| Senior Backend Engineer |


Reach out with any questions! All 165 open job postings are listed here.

Market Stirrings đźš©

SaaS startups are snagging more equity in their companies and selling less to investors. According to Carta, dilution is going down, especially for Series A to Series C startups from 2020 to 2023. Seed-stage startups experienced less change in that time period, averaging about 20.7% equity sold to investors and varying only 1.2%.

Good Reads đź“–

For the rushed reader …

  • After raising a $1.9 million pre-seed round last July, General Galactic has emerged from stealth to produce e-fuels, aiming to one day be everywhere people use methane.

  • Zipline and Amazon are doubling down on their drone delivery missions, each seeking out new business areas but in two different ways.

  • Founder and former CEO of HeadSpin Manish Lachwani was sentenced to 18 months in prison after presenting false revenue and customer numbers to investors, dishonestly boosting the company to unicorn status.

For the less rushed reader …

E-FUELING THE FIRE: One startup is fueling readier than ever. After raising a $1.9 million pre-seed round last July, General Galactic has emerged from stealth to produce e-fuels, aiming to one day be everywhere people use methane. The startup is worth paying attention to for its nuanced approach to e-fuels and product development, especially for such a young company. General Galactic is tackling full stack integration, planning to modularize system components and do everything in-house, from direct air capture units to electrolyzers and methane reactors. The idea is that this approach will minimize costs and shift the focus to selling fuel, rather than monetizing individual components. Tesla and its superchargers offer one successful example, but Tesla is also a much larger company with more abundant resources than General Galactic. Only time will tell if passing gas goes smoother in-house, or if the fumes will get to the startup's head.

ZIPPING AROUND: No more play dates with the birds because drones are officially being put to work. Zipline and Amazon are doubling down on their drone delivery missions, each seeking out new business areas but in two different ways. Providing no clear reason for the location swap, Amazon is winding down its Prime operations in California and setting up operations in Tolleson, Arizona instead. Amazon says it's "moving on to the next stage of the program, locating within existing Amazon delivery sites, and expanding to more populated areas.” As for Zipline, it has its eyes on the prize (food, obviously). Zipline is expanding from its previous foothold in impact, delivering medication and supplies to hospitals around the world, and taking on instant food delivery. Zipline will now focus on three areas: healthcare, quick commerce, and food. That was a lot; sorry for droning on and on.

FOUNDER HITS THE GROUNDER: A founder in Silicon Valley was caught cheffing it up -- well, cooking the books. Founder and former CEO of HeadSpin Manish Lachwani was sentenced to 18 months in prison after presenting false revenue and customer numbers to investors, dishonestly boosting the company to unicorn status. All key financial information, like annual recurring revenue, ARR growth over time, and actual revenue, passed through Lachwani first before going to the bookkeeper. Headspin's investors included GV, Alphabet's venture capital arm, and Iconiq Capital, which manages Mark Zuckerberg's cash. Some argue Silicon Valley's controls on up-and-coming companies are too loose, as investors rush to back hot companies and overlook red flags. Has the "fake it 'til you make it" motto gone too far?

Fire Up the Pre-Seeds🔥

Notable pre-seed raises in …

healthtech

  • Cell Bio Engines - One-stop therapy

    • The Problem: Cancer treatments currently have high patient-to-patient variability and face complicated supply chain issues, which limit manufacturing scalability.

    • The Tech: Off-the-shelf therapy to cure cancer utilizing healthy umbilical cord blood as a single stable source.

    • Recently Raised: $500k in funding led by SOSV.

    • Also Note: Cell BioEngines' first clinical-stage product is an expanded stem cell therapy which can be used as replacement tissue for bone marrow transplants.

artificial intelligence

  • Continuum - AI that has B2B’s back

    • The Problem: B2B companies face complicated issues in reverse logistics that impact efficiency and the customer experience.

    • The Tech: AI-powered platform that helps businesses optimize their operations to improve customer satisfaction and accelerate growth.

    • Recently Raised: $1.7 million in funding led by M25.

    • Also Note: The B2C side has experienced rapid advances in reverse logistics, yet the B2B side is 5x larger and falling behind in that area.

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.

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Thanks for reading, and see you next week!


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