Good morning!
A quick programming note - I am off until next Monday. See you all again then 👋
This Wednesday edition features:
A record-breaking Q3 for Miami Tech fundraising
Apple plans to unveil new MacBooks next Monday
Coinbase is entering the NFT game
Europe and Israel have minted 43 new software unicorns in 2021
And Microsoft and Nvidia team up on NLP training
It’s October 13, 2021.
1. #MiamiTech
Q3 numbers are in, and the Miami metro area blows past annual record for VC. Watch out for Q4 (Refresh Miami)
With three months still to go, the Miami metro area has already set a record for venture capital and is on pace for a breakout year. CB Insights new State of Venture Q3 2021 report shows a $1.36 billion sQ3 surge across 72 deals, bringing the year-to-date total to $2.4 billion. That total already exceeds each of the three preceding years.
Year-to-date Miami now ranks 9th among metro areas for dollars invested. And Q4 is off to a good start. As it stands now, VC dollars flowing in are up another 22% in Q4, and given the momentum the Miami metro area has been experiencing, well, there is still a lot of time left in 2021.
The VC in the US has also blown past 2020’s dollar total, adding up to $210.4 billion year to date across 8,869 deals, compared to $142 billion (9,846 deals) in 2020. Worth noting is that means that the Miami-Fort Lauderdale metro area’s slice was still teeny tiny, just 1.1% of US total.
But here is another interesting observation from the CB Insights’s list of the 10 most-active US-based investors in Q3: At least 7 of them now have some sort of presence in Miami; for some it may be one partner but it’s a start. And we can add at least one more from the global most-active list – SoftBank.
2. Events
Apple set for first MacBook Pro revamp in five years on Oct. 18 (Bloomberg)
Apple has set the date for a media event to unveil the first redesign to its MacBook Pro laptop in five years: Oct. 18. The event, which was announced with the tagline “Unleashed,” will be Apple’s second of the fall device launch season.
The new MacBook Pro will be the biggest change to the product since the current design was introduced in October 2016. The new models will be the first high-end MacBook Pros to replace Intel chips with Apple-designed processors. The Mac -- once Apple’s flagship product -- remains a steady seller for the company, generating about 10% of sales.
The latest models will include a new design, a MagSafe magnetic charger, and revamped displays in 14-inch and 16-inch sizes. The devices also will return the HDMI port removed in the last redesign and remove the controversial Touch Bar touch-screen strip from the keyboard. Apple last upgraded the low-end MacBook Pro at the end of last year with its M1 processor. The high-end MacBook Pro hasn’t been updated in two years.
The new MacBook Pros will use a higher-end version of the M1 chip, with increased performance for computing tasks and graphics. The new chips will have 10 cores total, including eight high-performance cores and two low-power cores for more basic operations. They will also come in both 16-core and 32-core configurations for graphics.
3. NFTs
Coinbase follows FTX.US into NFT trading (CoinDesk)
Coinbase is joining the NFT arms race. The U.S. crypto exchange is launching “Coinbase NFT,” a marketplace that will allow its users to buy and sell Ethereum-based digital collectibles. Coinbase’s NFT platform is expected to launch by the end of the year. Users can join the Coinbase NFT waitlist here.
The move comes just a day after rival exchange FTX.US announced a marketplace for Solana-based NFTs, with plans to support other blockchains, including Ethereum, in the future. If FTX’s bet on Solana is a signal that other blockchains are poised to take a slice of Etheruem’s hold on the NFT business, Coinbase is sending a different message – Ethereum’s NFT dominance has room to grow.
Coinbase’s product will take a direct swing at juggernaut marketplace OpenSea, which is currently home to the majority of Ethereum-based NFT trading. OpenSea has seen remarkable usage during the NFT market’s red-hot run in the past four months, completing as many as 80,000 transactions per day at its peak.
“If you’ve tried to create or purchase an NFT, you’ve probably found the user experience lacking,” Coinbase said in a blog post. “Coinbase NFT will make minting, purchasing, showcasing, and discovering NFTs easier than ever. We’re making NFTs more accessible by building intuitive interfaces that put the complexity behind the scenes.”
4. Startups
Europe and Israel minted 43 software unicorns in 2021 and are eating into US startup funding dominance (Insider)
Europe and Israel's software startups are raising ballooning amounts of cash and eating into established US funding dominance of the sector, according to analysis by venture capital firm Accel. SaaS startups in the two regions have raised record funding in 2021 to date, in keeping with an overall explosion in startup funding activity.
Europe and Israel have created 43 new unicorns in the sector during the first 9 months of 2021, up 84% year on year, versus 74 for the US, up 67% year on year.
The amount being raised by European and Israeli software startups is outpacing growth in the US, albeit starting from a lower base.
In the first 9 months of 2020, software firms in the two markets raised $9 billion in funding. That grew more than 3X in the same period in 2021 to $29 billion. In the US, startups raised $20 billion over the equivalent period in 2020. The figure more than doubled to $48 billion for 2021.
The US has conventionally dominated cloud software. Europe boasts fewer public competitors but software has grown to become the second-biggest startup sector by funding, behind fintech. Accel's bullishness stems from the speed at which startups in the two geographies are attaining multibillion-dollar valuations.
"We're now seeing the European and Israeli cloud ecosystem being supersized and moving out of the US' SaaS shadow," Philippe Botteri, partner at the firm said. "Europe and Israel are producing more SaaS unicorns than ever before and they're growing far bigger and faster than we've seen over the last five years."
5. NLP
Microsoft and Nvidia team up to train one of the world’s largest language models (VentureBeat)
Microsoft and Nvidia announced that they trained what they claim is the largest and most capable AI-powered language model to date: Megatron-Turing Natural Language Generation (MT-NLP). MT-NLP contains 530 billion parameters and achieves “unmatched” accuracy in a broad set of natural language tasks, Microsoft and Nvidia say — including reading comprehension, commonsense reasoning, and natural language inferences.
“The quality and results that we have obtained today are a big step forward in the journey towards unlocking the full promise of AI in natural language. The innovations of DeepSpeed and Megatron-LM will benefit existing and future AI model development and make large AI models cheaper and faster to train,” Nvidia’s senior director of product management and marketing for accelerated computing, Paresh Kharya, and group program manager for the Microsoft Turing team, Ali Alvi wrote in a blog post.
To train MT-NLG, Microsoft and Nvidia say that they created a training dataset with 270 billion tokens from English-language websites. Tokens, a way of separating pieces of text into smaller units in natural language, can either be words, characters, or parts of words. Like all AI models, MT-NLP had to “train” by ingesting a set of examples to learn patterns among data points, like grammatical and syntactical rules.
The dataset largely came from The Pile, an 835GB collection of 22 smaller datasets created by the open-source AI research effort EleutherAI. The Pile spans academic sources, communities, code repositories, and more. Training took place across 560 Nvidia DGX A100 servers, each containing 8 Nvidia A100 80GB GPUs.
6. Funding, IPOs, M&As
🪙 Celsius Network Secures $400 Million: The cryptocurrency lending platform has brought in new funding led by WestCap.
🏠 Plume Raises $300 Million: Palo Alto-based Plume has closed a new funding round led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2.
👩💻 Personio Lands $270 Million Series E: The HR platform for SMEs is now valued at over $6.3 million.
👩💻 Hibob Banks $150 Million: The HR management platform becomes the latest unicorn out of Israel valued at $1.65 billion.
🖥 Hailo Brings In $136 Million Series C: Israeli AI chipmaker Hailo has raised new funds led by Poalim Equity and Gil Agmon.
🖥 Hubilo Picks Up $125 Million Series B: The startup is doubling down on building a more engaging platform for virtual events.
💰 Open Announces $100 Million: Open is an Indian neobank. Google and Temasek led the funding round.
💰 Alviere Lands $70 Million Series B: New York City-based Alviere is an embedded finance startup.
☁️ SupportLogic Nabs $50 Million: The AI-powered customer service analytics platform has raised funds led by WestBridge.
🔪 ResQ Cooks Up $39 Million Series A: ResQ does end-to-end equipment repairs for over 4,000 restaurant groups.
⚕️ SkyCell Closes $35 Million Series C: The Swiss startup is developing smart containers for transporting medicines.
💰 Fount Bags $33.4 Million Series C: Fount is a machine-leaning-powered robo-advisor startup from South Korea.
🔒 FrankieOne Nabs $16 Million: The Australian startup provides fintechs with ID and fraud management services.
🏋️♀️ FitOn Secures $18 Million Series B: FitOn has an on-demand fitness platform. Delta-v Capital led the round.
As always, please feel free to share questions, feedback, or requests for future newsletters.
Cheers!
Eric
#BeAmbitious