Humane exits, education overhauls, and AI surges ⚡
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 🚨
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✨
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 157 open job postings are listed here.
Market Stirrings 🚩
Here's what the week looked like in pre-seed:
$2.7M
Total Amount Raised
9
Total Funding Rounds
$330k
Average Dollars per Round
$1.1M-$3.3M
Estimated Valuation Range
Data aggregated from proprietary research and Crunchbase; valuation estimate based on 10-20% ownership stake.
PRICEY SEEDS
Valuations are on the road to recovery, crawling back towards 2022 levels. In Q2 2024, priced seed valuations showed the greatest comeback and smallest gap compared to 2022 highs, with a 1.2% change from Q1 2022 for the 50th percentile.
Good Reads 📖
For the rushed reader …
Two of the early leaders of Humane, the Series A startup known for paving the shaky way in AI wearables, are leaving the company to launch a new AI startup.
A recent article in Wired outlines the debate about how AI should be used in education and the growing consensus that AI cannot replace teachers -- it can only augment.
2024 has been a big year for AI, yielding 13 U.S. AI unicorns in Q1 and Q2 and accounting for over 60% of the increase in total venture-backed valuation.
For the less rushed reader …
TRYING ON NEW SHOES: What’s the most humane way to say goodbye? Two of the early execs of Humane, the Series A startup known for paving the shaky way in AI wearables, are leaving the company to launch a new AI startup. The ex-Apple and now ex-Humane founding executives, Bethany Bongiorno and Imran Chaudhri, are starting fresh with Infactory, and they’re on a mission to build a fact-checking search engine. Leveraging LLMs, Infactory will be programmed to choose when to and when not to use AI. That sounds like witchcraft to me. I bet the startup is burning sage to do more than scare away AI hallucinations — it needs to summon enough luck to successfully compete with Google.
GETTING SCHOOLED: New at a Hot Topic near you: AI teachers. A recent article in Wired outlines the debate about how AI should be used in education and the growing consensus that AI cannot replace teachers – it can only augment. AI's role in edtech has been a heated topic since ChatGPT was first released. Many are skeptical to allow students to use generative AI technology, which would enable them to cut corners – or worse, take to heart a fact that is actually a hallucination. AI also can't connect emotional dots or read facial expressions the way humans do. The real opportunity may be in using AI to extend the reach of teachers and increase student engagement – Merlyn Origin is one example capitalizing on this, using AI to help teachers navigate digital resources on the fly. Robo-teachers have a long way to go before they'll gain acceptance at school.
ALL IN ON AI: AI is more than just talk – it's holding up the VC market on its motherboard. 2024 has been a big year for AI, yielding 13 U.S. AI unicorns in Q1 and Q2 and accounting for over 60% of the increase in total venture-backed valuation. In recent years, AI accounted for about 15%-17% of venture dollars invested in North America and Europe. That number is steadily increasing and now stands at more than 20% for 2024. Looking at Q2 alone, investments in AI startups surged to $24 billion, more than doubling from last quarter and becoming the largest sector for the first time, followed by biotech and healthtech. The race to adopt AI is barreling forwards and hopefully not letting any hazardous monkeys loose.
Fire Up the Pre-Seeds🔥
Notable pre-seed raises in …
climatetech
CO2Brew - Save Earth, drink beer
The Problem: The brewery industry is falling behind in tech and emissions.
The Tech: A CO2 recovery system designed for small- to medium-sized breweries to reduce emissions without sacrificing beverage-grade CO2.
Recently Raised: $800k in funding led by Avatar Innovations Inc.
Also Note: The funds will be used to build and operate a pilot before extending across North America.
edtech
EvelynElaine - A care in the world
The Problem: Family caregivers are often untrained, yet they provide an estimated $522 billion in uncompensated care per year.
The Tech: A platform for virtual and in-person classes to train up caregivers, reduce costs, and achieve better outcomes.
Recently Raised: $48k in funding from Wyoming Technology Business Center.
Also Note: The startup’s first program is a bootcamp offered to healthcare organizations of all sizes.
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.
If you’re a startup founder, we’d love to help where we can! Brex provides full-stack finance solutions for startups. Sign up via Necessary and get bonus points.
Thanks for reading, and see you next week!
© 2024 Necessary Ventures
San Francisco, California