The EV whirlwind and a new audience for NASA's tech
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✨
Virtue VC: Exclusively focused on pre-seed and seed healthcare founders. Searching for a highly ambitious individual dedicated to the next generation of healthcare companies and ready to double-down on the sector.
✨NEW FEATURED ROLE✨
Necessary Ventures: Are you interested in helping Necessary Ventures invest in what the world needs? We’re hiring a new intern cohort to support impact-driven projects.
| Intern |
Nevoya: First fully-electric trucking fleet in the United States, helping truckers trade gas-guzzling for environment-protecting. Get involved and tackle unsolved problems in the trucking industry.
Taro: Taro increases access to healthcare while reducing costs and physician burnout via direct primary care based health insurance.
| Product Engineer |
Reach out with any questions! All 163 open job postings are listed here.
Market Stirrings 🚩
Here's what the week looked like in pre-seed:
$9.2M
Total Amount Raised
16
Total Funding Rounds
$575k
Average Dollars per Round
$1.9M-$5.8M
Estimated Valuation Range
Data aggregated from proprietary research and Crunchbase; valuation estimate based on 10-20% ownership stake.
CAPITAL RAISING THE ROOF?
PitchBook is predicting another relatively low capital raising year for VC compared to 2021 and 2022. However, those estimates still appear to be a step up from 2017-2020 figures for the most part, with the upside case increasing about 8% year-over-year.
Good Reads 📖
For the rushed reader …
The bad news/good news sandwich: Fisker filed for bankruptcy, Rivian retooled operations prior to its Volkswagen partnership and 36% stock surge, Lucid cut jobs, and Nikola pivoted to hydrogen trucks.
Fearless Fund's co-founder Ayana Parsons announced that she will be stepping down, leaving behind partner Arian Simone, who will remain its CEO.
Cover, a brand-new startup from Brett Adcock, founder of Archer and Figure AI, is putting NASA technology to work to help prevent school shootings.
For the less rushed reader …
ONE ELEC-TRICK PONEY: Electric vehicle companies have gone from supercharged to super stressed. Over the past month or so, the tech industry has experienced a range of EV fallouts, but one spark of hope remains. The bad news/good news sandwich: Fisker filed for bankruptcy, Rivian retooled operations prior to its Volkswagen partnership and 36% stock surge, Lucid cut jobs, and Nikola pivoted to hydrogen trucks. The EV market’s challenges can be chalked up to broader struggles with funding, innovation, and supply chains. There’s no denying that Volkswagen’s agreement to invest up to $5 billion in Rivian is a huge win for the company, but it also begs the question of how long the runway will last. The future of EVs is walking the cable, and it’s hard to say what happens to sustainable transportation if the companies can’t find sustainable business models.
FEAR FUND: Fearless Fund's rough waters just got rougher, and a captain fell overboard. Fearless Fund's co-founder Ayana Parsons announced that she will be stepping down, leaving behind partner Arian Simone, who will remain its CEO. Fearless Fund was founded with the crucial mission to provide funding to Black women founders. Data shows that Black women start businesses faster than any other demographic, yet less than 1% of all VC dollars in 2023 went to Black-founded startups. Although the VC ecosystem expressed support for a fund dedicated to Black businesses, Fearless Fund is being sued by the politically conservative group American Alliance for Equal Rights (AAER). Parsons' departure from the company is reportedly not connected to the lawsuit, but it still raises red flags for DEI-focused initiatives that might have been in-vogue in 2020 but have since lost favor. Here's to hoping the rough waters lead to a treasure chest -- and the victory flag boasts a color that isn't red.
TOO COOL FOR SCHOOL: AI is getting smarter, and now it's searching for weapons. Cover, a brand-new startup from Brett Adcock, founder of Archer and Figure AI, is putting NASA technology to work to help prevent school shootings. The tech itself is a small cylindrical scanner that can be mounted on a doorway to detect anyone entering with weapons. The scanner is estimated to be 10x more powerful than the TSA scanners we encounter in airports. The systems are monitored using AI and only search for a finite number of weapons, including guns, knives, and explosives. No photos are stored -- the onboard neural net gathers information in the moment and sends alerts as needed. So far, Adcock has been bootstrapping the company and personally invested about $2 million. I'm wondering why we don't add these to airports too if they're so powerful; I think we'd all love for the security lines to move a little faster.
Fire Up the Pre-Seeds🔥
Notable pre-seed raises in …
healthtech
Cyprus Therapeutics - Deadly discoveries
The Problem: Therapeutically resistant diseases, like brain and pancreatic cancers, have limited paths for treatment.
The Tech: Chemical tech that enables synthesis and iteration of small molecule moieties previously unattainable by researchers, targeting diseases unresponsive to existing treatments.
Recently Raised: $500k in funding led by Ichor.
Also Note: The tech also enables Cyprus to modify natural molecules to improve their therapeutic properties.
other tech
Submix - Mixing it up for music
The Problem: Writers can collab on Google Docs, and presenters can collab on Google Slides – but what about musicians?
The Tech: A platform designed to streamline remote collaboration between audio professionals.
Recently Raised: $1 million in funding including participation from Angel Invest Ventures, SCNE, TSIC (Tiny Supercomputer Investment Company) and Vesna Capital.
Also Note: The pre-seed round attracted capital from a wide range of investors, also including Grammy winning music producers.
Outro🚪
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