Roses are red, violets are blue, FTX has no gift for you
Feb 14, 2023
Kaley Ubellacker
Market Stirrings 🚩
Here's what the week looked like in pre-seed:
Data aggregated from proprietary research and Crunchbase; valuation estimate based on 10-20% ownership stake.
JOBORTUNITIES 🚨
A few exciting opportunities with Necessary Ventures’ portfolio companies:
Taro is on the hunt for a product engineer to help them deliver health insurance designed to keep you healthy.
Are you someone who likes developing good software and is looking to make a big impact on not only a product but also a company’s growth and operations? This is your gig.
From Taro: “Our patients and doctors are actively using our software to navigate care and billing now, and we have lots of workflows we want to improve. We’d love any referrals to this role!"
Relief is looking for a strong back-end engineer to help them get people out of toxic debt.
Do you want to contribute to a fast-growing startup in the FinTech space? Even better, do you want to help Americans say bye to their debt for free? This is the perfect chance.
If you know of anyone, please reach out to us or send an email to careers@relief.app.
Particle Health is looking for a senior software engineer to help create the new world of healthcare data exchange.
Are you exhilarated by the thought of using your skills to think big and reinvent industry standards? This might be for you.
This role allows you to own all steps in the development process from design to implementation, solving complex technical challenges and driving adoption of those solutions.
Feel free to reach out with any questions! All 182 open job postings are listed here.
NV Portfolio Highlight 🎢

It’s that time of year. The W2s are flying into mailboxes; TurboTax subscriptions are reluctantly refreshing on desktops; cold sweats are plaguing every taxpayer in the night. The reckoning hour is coming where every U.S. citizen is forced to balance their checkbooks and face-off with the scariest d word of all: debt.
But what if there was an easy way out of your debt and all the tax season anxiety that comes with it? Relief is a nifty startup automating debt relief. Its app uses machine learning algorithms and collective bargaining to decrease people’s debt balances. You can file your taxes from the bath, while Relief does the math for you and negotiates directly with creditors, bringing you one step closer to fiscal freedom.
The company was founded by serial entrepreneur Jason Saltzman who co-founded SeamlessDocs and The Alley, a co-working space in NYC, before moving on to co-found Relief. It raised a $15M Series A round last February with a who’s who of investors and is currently hiring. If you’re curious to know how they weave people out of debt, or maybe you want to try your hand at freeing people of debt, scroll through this link for job opportunities.
Fire Up the Pre-Seeds🔥
Highlights from this week’s pre-seed raises:
STARTUPS TO WATCH 🔥
Acceldata is building a data observability platform that helps businesses understand the health of their data and identify any potential problems. Last week, it announced a $50 million Series C funding round led by March Capital to further expand and innovate its products.
Caldera is developing a no-code web3 infrastructure platform to simplify creating app-specific blockchains. The company raised $9 million in two rounds led separately by Sequoia Capital partner Shaun Maguire and Dragonfly Capital investment partner Ani Pai.
Redwood Materials takes end-of-life electric vehicle batteries and other automotive scrap and turns them into raw materials for new EV battery cells. The startup secured a $2 billion loan from the US Department of Energy to build a new battery recycling facility in Nevada.
Abacus Bioscience is creating a powerful approach for vaccines to treat people with cancer. The company raised $4.4 million dollars led by the Washington Research foundation as part of an ongoing seed round to continue refining its technology.
REDDIT HIGHLIGHT 📈
In case you’re looking for a pick-me-up today, here’s a solid work of art trending on Reddit.

… and one of my favorite comments from this thread:

I have to agree with Reddit on this one. Of all the names Google could have chosen, Bard?! Maybe Google should have asked ChatGPT for some help naming.
Outro🚪
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Some last matters of business:
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Thanks for reading, and see you next week!