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Venom Foundation, a layer-1 blockchain licensed and regulated by the Abu Dhabi Global Market, and investment manager Iceberg Capital have partnered to launch a $1 billion venture fund, the two firms announced on Wednesday.

The $1 billion vehicle, Venom Ventures Fund (VVF), is a blockchain-agnostic fund that will invest in pre-seed to Series A rounds for web3 protocols and decentralized applications (dApps) that focus on trends like payments, asset management, DeFi, banking services and GameFi.

The fund’s leadership team includes Peter Knez, ex-CIO of BlackRock and former global CIO for fixed income at Barclays Global Investors, and Mustafa Kheriba, a board member for multiple family offices and long-term investment professional in the Middle East and North African regions.

The fund aims to be the intersection where “old money meets new,” according to its website. In general, the VVF team has experience growing both web3 funds and traditional funds as well as experience in providing growth capital for both startups and scaleups.

“Through the provision of our accelerator programs, grants and targeted capital injections, VVF provides the support and resources required to help its portfolio companies,” Knez said to TechCrunch.

VVF will also use Iceberg Capital’s resources to offer incubation programs, among other things. It will also assist projects with marketing, exchange listing, technical, legal and regulatory support, the two firms said in a press release.

“With a steadfast commitment to identifying and investing in highly promising, scalable and consumer-focused companies within the rapidly emerging web3 ecosystem, VVVF is actively investing and building a portfolio of leading-edge web3 firms that are poised to achieve widespread adoption and achieve significant growth,” Knez said.

Alongside the fund’s announcement, VVF also made its first investment leading digital world-focused Nümi Metaverse’s $20 million funding round.

Amid the current downward market, this fund is one of the few massive funds popping up in the space right now. During the last bull run, it seemed like a number of billion-dollar to multibillion-dollar funds were popping up frequently, but now, not so much.

“Venom Ventures is determined to make a meaningful impact by leveraging its financial strength to provide value in a number of key areas including regulation, technology and acceleration,” Knez said. “Recognizing that these are challenging times, VVF is committed to fostering innovation, driving growth and creating opportunities for its portfolio companies to succeed.”

Venom Foundation and Iceberg Capital launch $1B venture fund to invest in web3 by Jacquelyn Melinek originally published on TechCrunch

Meta rescinded full-time offers from some job candidates, a spokesperson confirmed.

“As we continue to reassess our hiring needs, we’ve made the difficult decision to withdraw offers to a small number of candidates,” a Meta spokesperson told TechCrunch. “While this decision did not come lightly, it allows us to remain thoughtful as we readjust our hiring through 2023 to align with our highest-priority work.”

Meta did not comment on how many people were impacted or what departments had rescinded offers.

According to engineer and writer Gergely Orosz, about 20 recent grads had offers rescinded to work in Meta’s office. TechCrunch viewed LinkedIn posts from two rescinded candidates who had jobs lined up in software engineering.

Meta previously rescinded 2023 summer internship offers at its London office. Across the whole company, Meta laid off 11,000 workers (or 13% of its workforce) in November.

As Meta funnels billions of dollars into its unprofitable Reality Labs division, the company’s financial outlook has inspired uncertainty in its investors. In the second quarter of 2022, Meta posted its first-ever revenue decline; the following quarter, Meta’s revenue declined 4% year over year to hit $27.7 billion. Meanwhile, net income was just $4.395 billion, down from $9.194 billion year over year. Reality Labs, Meta’s division for augmented and virtual reality projects, lost $3.672 billion alone in Q3.

Meta’s situation is not helped by the overall state of the tech industry. Companies like Amazon and Coinbase have also rescinded job offers and waged large-scale layoffs.

Meta rescinded some full-time job offers by Amanda Silberling originally published on TechCrunch

Apple Maps today is gaining a new tool that will allow the decade-plus-old service to better compete with Google: it will now allow business owners to update and manage their own information on the platform, including key details like business hours and location, photos, logos, special offers and promotions, and more. To do so, the company is launching a new web portal called Apple Business Connect, which lets businesses manage their presence across Apple’s 1.5 billion devices from a single dashboard.

The service is a long time coming for Apple Maps. Although first launched in 2012, the mapping platform for years had relied on a simplified system, Apple Business Register, to update Maps listings with corrected information. And it leveraged third-party data from partners like Foursquare, Yelp, and Tripadvisor, to provide users with other business information, ratings, and reviews. For comparison, Google has allowed business owners to manage their listings since 2005 — though its product, now called Google Business Profiles, has gone through numerous name changes since then.

Apple says it won’t remove its integrations with Yelp as Apple Business Connect launches. Customers will see be able to see Yelp photos and reviews in the business place cards and will be able to choose Yelp as their provider for things like placing an order or viewing a restaurant’s menu, for example. However, the new system will allow business owners to now augment their listings with the important details they may lack, resulting in richer, more detailed, and more up-to-date listings.

After going through a verification process, business owners will be able to update their business place card with basic information like the business hours, phone numbers, address and more, including an “about” page, as well as with their business logo and photos. For the first time, they can also update the business’s category and even add subcategories to help Maps users find their business when searching. And they can customize the information that appears in the “Good to Know” section of their listing, which includes helpful info like whether a place is “good for kids,” has “free Wi-Fi,” offers “free delivery,” is “wheelchair accessible,” and the like.

If the location on the listing is wrong, the owner can move the pin on the map to a more precise location, as well.

In addition, some business listings on Apple Maps feature an “Action” button that allows a customer to take some sort of action, like booking a hotel room with Booking.com, ordering groceries with Instacart, or, as of recently, finding a parking spot with SpotHero. With Apple Business Connect, the business owner will now be able to add custom actions like these for themselves.

The listings can also for the first time be customized to display time-limited special offers and incentives, like food deals or tickets to a show. These updates, or “showcases,” can include some explanatory text, a photo, and even a custom action for the customers to take. They are free to use.

Apple will be working with partners, including Walmart, to enhance their business place cards in new ways, as well. For example, customers who visit the Walmart place card will be able to go to a “text to shop” feature by tapping on a “message us” button in the app. They’ll then be able to start typing in Messages for Business, the service that allows customers to connect with a business via iMessage.

After verification, business owners will also be able to designate other members of the team who are allowed to update their information and can configure their account to update multiple locations, if needed.

As owners use Apple Business Connect to make the updates, they’ll see a live preview on the screen so they know how their listing will look before it’s published.

While keeping the business information current is the primary reason to interact with the product, Business Connect will also offer insights that allow them to learn how their place card is performing over time. These can be viewed in an insight dashboard where they can learn how customers find their business and how they interact with the place card.

While many Apple device owners still prefer using Google Maps over Apple Maps for a number of reasons, Apple points out that the updated place cards won’t only live in the Maps app itself. These updates will flow across Apple’s ecosystem, to enhance business listings in other places like Siri Spotlight, Apple Wallet, Safari, and more.

While Apple says today it has no immediate plans to monetize this system to allow owners to elevate their listings in some way, like ads, the Business Connect platform seems to be setting the stage for some sort of future endeavor in that area. Apple in recent years has shown an increased interest in the digital advertising market and disrupting the Facebook-Google duopoly. Elsewhere on mobile, Apple’s privacy changes have helped to boost its own ads business, reports found. It wouldn’t be surprising to see Apple now considering an angle into the search ads market, too — particularly if it could leverage its iOS platform and various features, like Siri Spotlight, to help it along the way.

Apple Business Connect is launching to countries around the world as of Wednesday, initially in the following languages: English, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, and Turkish.

Apple Maps’ business listings are about to get more detailed with launch of ‘Apple Business Connect’ by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch

Netflix will continue its foray into livestreaming with a new multi-year partnership with the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) Awards. Beginning in 2024, the award ceremony will be broadcast live on the streamer, becoming the first major film and television awards show to air on Netflix.

As part of the new deal, Netflix will stream this year’s 29th annual SAG awards on Netflix’s YouTube channel. The award show will premiere online on February 26 at 8 p.m. ET.

“The SAG Awards are beloved by the creative community and viewers alike, and now even more fans around the world will be able to celebrate these talented actors,” Netflix Head of Global TV Bela Bajaria said in a statement. “As we begin to explore livestreaming on Netflix, we look forward to partnering with SAG-AFTRA to elevate and expand this special ceremony as a global live event in 2024 and the years to come.”

It was only a matter of time before the SAG Awards moved to a streaming service. Since 1998, the ceremony has broadcasted on TBS and TNT. However, SAG announced in May 2022 that it would no longer broadcast on the networks.

Moving to a streamer is a smart move for the award show and gives viewers a more affordable way to watch than cable. Notably, the 28th annual SAG awards only had 1.8 million viewers, a substantial decrease from 2 million in 2020 and 2.7 million in 2019.

However, even though Netflix has the largest subscriber base among its rivals, with 223.09 million global subs, the streaming giant hasn’t tested its livestreaming capability yet, which it only just announced in last year.

The company is set to test its first-ever livestreaming event early this year when it streams the live comedy special starring Chris Rock.

“We are thrilled to embark on this exciting new partnership with Netflix and we look forward to expanding the global audience for our show,” SAG-AFTRA National Executive Director Duncan Crabtree-Ireland added. “As the only televised awards program exclusively honoring the performances of actors, whose work is admired by millions of fans, the SAG Awards are a unique and cherished part of the entertainment universe.”

Netflix gets live streaming rights to SAG Awards in 2024 by Lauren Forristal originally published on TechCrunch

Last year was a painful one for startups and their employees. Venture capitalists tightened their investments, thousands of people lost their jobs and company valuations stalled or fell amid a protracted bear market.

An estimated 24% of startups on the Secfi platform reduced their fair market valuations in 2022, according to an internal analysis. For people working at those startups, that means some (in some cases, all) of their employee stock options spent 2022 underwater.

Separately, a Secfi analysis of 1,502 funding rounds at late-stage startups since March 2021 finds that startups are raising more flat rounds and down rounds than before.

A number of startups that raised money in 2022 did not disclose their post-money valuations, suggesting that the true number of startups that lowered their valuations in the past 12 months could be even higher than publicly reported.

Employee stock options are a meaningful factor in startup compensation, and underwater stock options have the potential to negatively impact hiring and retention across the startup ecosystem.

Underwater stock options

An analysis of more than 4,300 stock option grants uploaded to the Secfi platform in 2022 shows that nearly one of every four startups reduced their fair market valuations at some point during the year.

The highest-profile example of this phenomenon was Klarna, which raised venture capital in mid-2021 at a $45.6 billion valuation but was forced to raise a new round of funding in mid-2022 at a $6.7 billion valuation — an 85% decline. Other large companies that cut their valuations (without raising funding) include Instacart and Checkout.com.

Stock options are a high-risk, high-reward form of compensation and remain one of the most compelling drivers of startup employment and retention.

An analysis by Carta of employment data from 2018 suggested that the average startup employee works for just two years at a company before jumping to their next opportunity. Underwater stock options are a problem for people who joined a startup in 2020 or 2021, as they’re now finding that their shares are worth less than when they were hired.

The average startup employee in Silicon Valley received 12% to 14% of the value of their salary in the form of stock options, per Carta. In other words, a startup worker who earns a $150,000 annual salary could expect to earn an average of $21,000 worth of stock options as part of their total compensation package.

When a startup is successful, stock options rise in value — in some cases, by many multiples. Stock options make up 86% of the total net worth of the average startup employee, according to financial data that employees voluntarily shared with Secfi.

Underwater stock options can impact employee retention, as employees instead look to other startups with a stronger valuation growth. As a result, startup leaders who want to retain their employees may need to consider cash and retention bonuses, higher salaries or a stock option repricing program.

The average cost to exercise stock options remains high

Despite economic headwinds, the cost to exercise stock options remains high.

In 2022, the average Secfi client required $846,000 to exercise their stock options and pay associated taxes. Like in previous years, taxes continue to make up the majority of the total cost to exercise.

High costs remain a major reason why startup employees fail to exercise their stock options.

Inside Secfi’s 2022 state of stock options equity report by Ram Iyer originally published on TechCrunch

Seek, an automation platform for data analytics tasks, today announced that it raised $7.5 million across pre-seed and seed rounds that had participation from Conviction Partners, Battery Ventures and former Snowflake CEO Bob Muglia. CEO Sarah Nagy says that the funding will be put toward growing Seek’s team into the next year, particularly on the engineering and data science side of the company.

“I founded Seek last year, after working as a quant and data scientist for more than a decade,” Nagy told TechCrunch in an email interview. “I wanted to solve a pain point that I experienced over and over again throughout my career. I’ve often found myself feeling like a ‘human computer’ to translate between my less technical colleagues and the data they needed. For example, sales reps would send me messages asking me to pull some basic, but custom, statistics for our customers. It would frustrate me because it would take time away from the research that I wanted to be doing, that added long-term value to the business. From my colleagues’ perspective, it was also really annoying to wait a long time for me to manually get them the data.”

Seek’s core product is a natural language interface for data that can plug into existing data and communication tools, including cloud data warehouses (i.e., analytics databases stored in the public cloud), within a business. Users can ask questions of Seek they’d normally ask a data team across apps like Slack, Microsoft Teams and email.

Powering Seek’s search and cataloging features is a family of AI language models trained on data including ebooks, online articles and websites as well as proprietary data. The platform stores both questions and answers from users inside a knowledge base, so they can be found quickly. In this way, Seek becomes more “intelligent” at working with a company’s data the more it’s used, according to Nagy.

“What Seek is hoping to do for data teams is automate the mundane, manual work that must be done by hand as it has historically been too complicated to automate,” Nagy said. “As a former data scientist who used to do this kind of work, I know that my quality of life would have improved if these tasks had been automated, and the work that I could have done with the time saved would have produced long-term, fundamental differences in my companies’ strategy and product.”

There’s been lots in the news lately about AI that confidently presents answers that later turn out to be biased or factually untrue. When asked what Seek’s doing about it with respect to its own AI, Nagy said the company has a patent pending for a “control flow” to limit inaccuracies presented to users.

“I predict that, as the generative AI hype cycle plays out, more conversations will be had about the flaws in the quality of AI-generated content, and how users can protect themselves from any inaccuracies,” he added. “My hope is that we will become a thought leader when it comes to educating customers on how to maximize the benefits of generative AI while having the right process in place to handle its limitations.”

Seek falls into the category of enterprise search engines known as “cognitive search.” Rivals include Amazon Kendra and Microsoft SharePoint Syntex, which draw on knowledge bases to cobble together answers to company-specific questions. Startups like Hebbia, Kagi, Andi and You.com also leverage AI models to return specific content in response to queries as opposed to straightforward lists of results.

Despite the competition, nine-employee Seek has managed to sign on “household-name” customers, Nagy claims. He wouldn’t reveal revenue or name names, save saying that Seek’s roughly dozen clients — which range from “startups to the Fortune 100” — come from industries including business-to-business software as a service, fintech, direct-to-consumer and consumer packaged goods.

“Generative AI seems to be the exception to the slowdown in tech right now, and Seek has benefited from the explosion in popularity of tools like ChatGPT,” Muglia said. “[Moreover,] Seek was founded post-pandemic, and our users are knowledge workers who can work from home. As companies’ digital transformation initiatives accelerated during the pandemic, including more organizations adopting ambitious data initiatives, my hypothesis for building Seek strengthened.”

In the coming months, Nagy says that Seek’s focus will be onbuilding app integrations, making the onboarding process more automated and “continuing to improve our customers’ experience with our platform.”

Seek lands $7.5M investment for AI that answers domain-specific questions by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch

Jio Platforms said on Wednesday it has rolled out 5G to 101 cities in just as many days as the Indian telecom giant looks to court customers aggressively with faster data speeds.

The firm said on Wednesday that its 5G network is now live across at least one city each in 18 Indian states. Bharti Airtel, Jio Platform’s chief rival in India, in comparison has extended 5G to about 30 cities, it said earlier Wednesday.

Jio Platforms, part of Indian conglomerate Reliance Industries, is making a $25 billion bet to bring 5G to “every town” in the South Asian market by the end of 2023.

The firm spent over $11 billion to buy more 5G airwaves spectrum from the government than any other telecom player in the country in August last year.

Faster data access has become a key differentiator for telecom networks in India to lure customers away from their rivals, analysts say. Reliance entered the telecom market seven years ago and now commands the lion’s share, thanks to it being early with the rollout of 4G — and cutrate cheap data and free voice calls offerings.

“With such high expected data loads, Indian CSPs have pinned their hope on promise of 5G, which will allow them to bring in enhancement in capacities, efficiencies in their network, increase in ARPU and at the same time open new realms of revenue streams from the 5G play. The below table shows the expected roadmap, Indian 5G evolution is likely to undertake,” KPMG wrote in a report last year.

India’s Jio says it has rolled out 5G to over 100 cities in 100 days by Manish Singh originally published on TechCrunch

There’s lots of people out there with their finger on the pulse of the business, who have ideas on how to build useful apps, but lack basic coding skills and the ability to put their ideas to work. What if those people could describe an app they wanted to build, then add connectors to common data sources, or even build a complex workflow – all without writing a single line of code?

That’s what Blaze is attempting to do, an early stage startup from two women founders, who have already built and sold one company. Today the company announced the product is generally available for the first time, and also announced a $3.5 million pre-seed round.

“The problem we solve is enabling any team to build very custom, and also complex, highly secure applications and tools without needing code. And one of the really exciting pieces for us is that it’s also AI-powered,” co-founder and CEO Nanxi Liu told TechCrunch.

The AI-powered bits are natural language processing delivered via the OpenAI API, which enables users to simply tell Blaze what they want to do by typing a description, which the service then turns into code. Company co-founder and CTO Tina Denuit-Wojcik explained that it requires a great deal of pre- and post-processing on Blaze’s part to translate the typed commands into operational code, but the API helps drive it.

“The user can type just a few sentences, but we have to make it aware of all the context of the data, and other things that are on the page, how to connect and what actions are possible,” Denuit-Wojcik said.

As they build an application, users can drag and drop connectors such as ecommerce tools like Shopify or payments like Stripe. Other pre-built integrations include Airtable, DocuSign, Freshdesk, Google Sheets, Salesforce and others. The company has even built its own database called Blaze Tables.

Among the kinds of applications they are helping people build include document portals, customer success dashboards, inventory management systems and contract workflows.

The two founders have been working together for over a decade, having founded a digital signage company called Enplug in 2012, which raised $3.7 million (per Crunchbase) before being acquired by Spectrio in early 2021. Lui says she and Denuit-Wojcik were inspired to launch another startup, and began focusing on no-code solutions, based on their experience at their previous company where they recognized a need for such a tool.

The new company has a dozen employees to this point. As two immigrant women founding a company, they are acutely aware of the need to build a diverse and inclusive team. Plus, Liu says that the product itself will open up the sector to more people who are traditionally left out of tech jobs because they lack coding skills.

“I think it’s just as how we operate. We are very thoughtful about this. And we also are very thoughtful in terms of how this product can help more women who maybe don’t have the technical skill set, and now they can go build technical products,” Liu said.

Today’s $3.5 million investment closed at the end of last year. Flybridge Capital and MaC Venture Capital led the round with participation from a slew of industry angels.

Blaze makes coding more accessible with AI-driven, no code app builder by Ron Miller originally published on TechCrunch

Artificial intelligence startups, and (thanks to GPT and Open AI) specifically those helping humans communicate with each other, are commanding a lot of interest from investors, and today the latest of these is announcing a big round of funding. DeepL, a startup that provides instant translation-as-a-service both to businesses and to individuals — competing with Google, Bing and other online tools — has confirmed a fundraise at a €1 billion valuation (just over $1 billion at today’s rates).

Cologne, Germany-based DeepL is not disclosing the full amount that it’s raised — it doesn’t want to focus on this aspect, CEO and founder Jaroslaw Kutylowski said in an interview — but as we were working on this story we heard a range of figures. At one end, an investor that was pitched on the funding told TechCrunch that DeepL was aiming to raise $125 million. At the other end, a report with a rumor about the funding from back in November said the amount was around $100 million. The funding closed earlier this month.

The startup is also not confirming or disclosing other financials, but the investor source said that the $1 billion valuation was based on a 20x multiple of DeepL’s annual run rate, which was at $50 million at the end of last year. In the current fundraising climate, this is a pretty bullish multiple, but it speaks to the company’s growth, which the investor noted is currently at 100%, and the fact that DeepL’s breaking even and close to being profitable.

What is more definitive is the list of investors: DeepL said that new backer IVP was leading the round, with Bessemer Venture Partners, Atomico, and WiL also participating. Previous backers in the company also include Benchmark and btov.

DeepL primarily provides translation as a service to businesses rather than individuals, and its forte up to now has been working primarily with smaller and medium organizations.

Some of those have the potential for a lot of scale: DeepL powers translation on Mastodon, for example. This is a route that the startup is planning to continue, but the plan is to use the funding to expand that scope both to cover larger enterprises, and to build out new services, such as a Grammarly-style monolingual (same-language) writing improver that is in closed beta now and will be launching soon.

It will also continue to invest in R&D. As we have previously noted, the company’s model was originally trained on a database of over a billion translations and queries, plus a method of double-checking translations by searching for similar snippets on the web. This is then housed on a supercomputer that both provides translations but continues to learn and improve as well.

Right now, Kutylowski says that around 60-70% of the company’s staff are engineers, and they are focused on building more tech on a range of timescales from short-term with commercial focus, to medium and longer-term “moonshots” and breakthroughs in language modeling for its own sake. Despite the pressure on deep learning these days — investors want returns and commercial end points — the latter of these, the moonshots, remain a priority for the company — something DeepL has been able to retain because it’s been growing its core translation services (sold on a “pro” tier and also offered in more limited formats as a “free” tier).

DeepL is indeed in a fortunate position. A lot of startups have been struggling to raise rounds, and those that have say that there’s been a lot of pressure on valuations as a result of that, but Kutylowski said that the rising tide for AI-based language services has helped DeepL on this front.

“What I liked about 2022 was the rise of AI in everyone’s perception,” he said, adding that AI has “more or less become like a typical tool” rather than a novelty. “From our perspective that’s great, allowing us to make an entry into more markets and making usage of our tools more commonplace. It feels like we’ve moved on from, ‘Do I trust AI?’”

The company has long competed with the likes of Google and Microsoft on the translation front — with the smaller upstart often comparing favorably to these Goliaths. Notably, neither of these are investors, and Kutylowski very much declined to comment on whether either of them, or any other big tech company like Amazon (itself very big on AI and with obvious use cases for strong translation tools) had ever approached it for investment, partnerships or acquisitions.

Now DeepL might potentially have another kind of competitor on the horizon in the form of OpenAI, which is spinning out a number of very high-profile AI-powered tools and changing the public conversation on how they are used, for better or worse. And which itself is reportedly in the market for a fundraise — $10 billion at a whopping $29 billion valuation led by Microsoft.

It’s not clear how and if OpenAI might build its own translation services, or whether it could team up with a third party. Kutylowski said that for now there are “no concrete plans” on how or if DeepL would ever work with Open AI, and what form that could take, but he noted that the language models that DeepL uses are similar to those OpenAI uses, and that the two companies have a number of customers in common. “They want to intermingle them together,” he said.

In the meantime, DeepL’s plan is to continue improving the services it already provides.

“We are always in race mode on the translation side of things,” Kutylowski said. “We are accustomed to big adversaries, and part of our culture is to push forward through that.”

DeepL, the AI-based language translator, raises over $100M at a $1B+ valuation by Ingrid Lunden originally published on TechCrunch