Lume Weekly Private Market News & Notes 6.19.2022
Covers news about startups, private deals, technology, and innovation in the private market
📊 Stats of the Week 📊
ChatGPT and Google Bard adoption
💰 Fundraising 💰
AI startup Cohere locks up $270M at $2.2B valuation (Jun 8)
Cohere, which is developing an AI model ecosystem for the enterprise, announced that it raised $270M as part of its Series C round led by Inovia Capital at a valuation of $2.2B. The startup claims that it works with companies like Jasper and HyperWrite for copywriting generation tasks.
Cloud cost management startup CloudZero lands $32M investment (Jun 12)
CloudZero, a cloud cost management startup, announced that it raised $32M in a Series B funding round. CloudZero has over 100 customers and the CEO said the company’s revenue increased 10x since 2021.
AI-generated video platform Synthesia secures $90M at unicorn valuation (Jun 13)
Synthesia allows companies to create instructional videos from text featuring stock or custom AI avatars for corporate training and more. The startup raised a $90M Series C at a $1B valuation. Its CEO said that the company has over 50,000 customers with a user growth rate of 456% yoy. Over 15 million videos generated on the platform to date.
Majority, a digital bank for US migrants, raises $9.75M (Jun 14)
Majority, a mobile banking company offering financial services to U.S. migrants, closed $9.75M funding. The company, founded in 2019, offers migrants a bank account, debit card, and free international money transfer. The company says that Majority’s transaction volume is growing 6x per year.
Paro raises $25M in Series C funding (Jun 14)
Paro is a platform that uses algorithms to identify and recommend financial talent e.g. accountants to businesses. Customers can connect on-demand to accounting and finance experts. The company announced it raised $25M in Series C funding. The company says that its revenue has tripled since Q3 2021 while average client spend has doubled.
Income verification platform Truework raises $24M (Jun 14)
Truework, an income and employment verification platform, announced a strategic partnership and $24M in equity funding from consumer credit reporting giant TransUnion.
FIA Tech raises additional $25.4m in funding round (Jun 14)
New York-based FIA Tech, a provider of financial and legal agreements and brokerage services, closed a $25.4M round led by six existing shareholders: Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Wells Fargo, Barclays, and Citi.
🗞 Others 🗞
Checkout.com cuts internal valuation by another 15% (Jun 1)
London-based payment platform Checkout.com has reportedly reduced its internal valuation to around $9B. The price at which the company’s employees can exercise their stock options had been reduced to $55 a share, down from $65 a share.
Reddit goes down just as a site-wide protest against its unpopular new API policy kicks off (Jun 12)
As thousands of Reddit communities went dark to protest the company’s controversial new policy that will put third-party apps out of business, the website itself has gone down. Reddit confirmed to TechCrunch a planned protest against its new policy has caused the outage.
Salesforce pledges to invest $500M in generative AI startups (Jun 12)
Salesforce announced that it’s growing its Generative AI Fund, the part of the company’s Salesforce Ventures VC off-shoot backing startups developing “responsible generative AI,” from $250M in size to $500M.
SpaceX successfully launches the world’s first “space factory” (Jun 12)
SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket deployed 72 small satellites for customers including the world’s first space factory. A California startup Varda Space Industries is building the world’s first space factory to manufacture pharmaceuticals in space. “There are high-performance products that are only possible to make in zero-gravity, which is a manufacturing capability that cannot be replicated in any factory on Earth,” said CEO Will Bruey. SpaceX helped carry and deploy the space factory created by Varda.