1 departure, 1 discovery, & 1 difficulty đź§
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.
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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.
Reach out with any questions! All 175 open job postings are listed here.
Market Stirrings đźš©
Here's what the week looked like in pre-seed:
$7.5M
Total Amount Raised
11
Total Funding Rounds
$675k
Average Dollars per Round
$3M-$7M
Estimated Valuation Range
Data aggregated from proprietary research and Crunchbase; valuation estimate based on 10-20% ownership stake.
Down Rounds on the Up
Carta data for Q1 revealed that down rounds, ironically, are still on the rise. In Q1 2024, 23% of all rounds were down rounds, up 2.3% from last quarter and the highest share in the last 5 years. That percentage has steadily creeped up since Q1 2022, and it seems like “don’t look down” is hardly an option in recent quarters.
Good Reads đź“–
For the rushed reader …
OpenAI’s chief scientist Ilya Sutskever laid down his laptop and parted ways with OpenAI.
Platelets tend to be in short supply, and one successful study has proven synthetic platelets made from hydrogel could solve the problem.
Neuralink shared that its brain implant, the first to be implanted within a human, malfunctioned and a number of threads retracted from the patient’s brain.
For the less rushed reader …
ABANDONING SHIP OR ABANDONED BY SHIP?: Is it just me, or did ChatGPT learn how to gossip? OpenAI’s chief scientist Ilya Sutskever laid down his laptop and parted ways with OpenAI. Some sources imply his reason for departure is related to a kind of shame game, as Sutskever helped lead the failed coup to remove Sam Altman and then later changed his mind. Regardless of history, Altman released a heartfelt statement sharing that Sutskever “has something personally meaningful he is going to work on.” It was announced that Jakub Pachocki, the company’s director of research, will be taking over. Pachocki is another key character in the OpenAI drama, spearheading the development of GPT-4 and OpenAI Five, in addition to fundamental deep learning research. No matter what, we’re pretty excited to see if there’s a big pre-seed company on the horizon to come from Sutskever’s “meaningful work.”
A CLOT TO CHEW: Healthtech has a lot on its platelet according to recent news. Platelets tend to be in short supply, and one successful study has proven synthetic platelets made from hydrogel could solve the problem. Platelets are essential for blood clotting but have a shelf life of only a week at most, meaning when blood donations are in low supply, platelets disappear even faster. Research conducted by Ashley Brown, associate professor of biomedical engineering at North Carolina State University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, demonstrated that hydrogels can be used to form nanoparticles that mimic the size and shape of platelets. Testing on mice, rats, and pigs revealed that the synthetic versions produced healing rates similar to natural ones. Brown founded startup SelSym Biotech to further advance the research ahead of the next big step for artificial platelets: testing on people. Great news for everyone hiding from the Red Cross and their pointy needles – your platelets might not be needed after all!
BRAINING CATS AND DOGS: Neuralink’s brain-computer interface is facing some headwinds. Neuralink shared that its brain implant, the first to be implanted within a human, malfunctioned and a number of threads retracted from the patient’s brain. Although the malfunction does not pose any risk to the patient’s safety, the retracted threads reduced the number of electrodes available for measuring the BCI’s speed and accuracy. Instead of removing the implant, Neuralink introduced modifications to the algorithm to enhance the user interface and improve translations from signals into cursor movements. Despite the setback, the patient reportedly uses the implant about eight hours per weekday and up to ten hours on the weekend. While this exploration of the BCI’s safety in humans seems to be showing positive results, it was only inserted in January this year – only time will tell how the BCI truly fares with age. Neuralink is certainly threading the needle between freaky Frankenscience and benevolent genius.
Fire Up the Pre-Seeds🔥
Notable pre-seed raises in …
Climatetech
Active Surfaces - Panels on a flexible diet
The Problem: Today’s solar panels are heavy, rigid, expensive, and inefficient.
The Tech: Lightweight, flexible solar panels that can be integrated on any surface from small consumer products to large industrial buildings.
Recently Raised: $5.6 million in funding led by Safar Partners.
Also Note: The startup spun out from MIT and includes highly skilled leadership. Co-founder Shiv Bhakta was recently featured in Forbes 30 Under 30 2024 in Energy, and advisor Moungi Bawendi was awarded a Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2023.
healthtech
Crosby Health - There’s no denying AI
The Problem: Hospitals struggle to combat claim denials (denied insurance claims) amounting to $20 billion per year.
The Tech: An AI-powered system that automates administrative clinical tasks, including medical coding and denial management.
Recently Raised: $2.2 million in funding led by Amplo Ventures.
Also Note: Its clinical LLM, Apollo, saves over 98% of the time required to generate appeal letters. It also achieved a 91.8% score on the medical license board exam.
Outro🚪
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