📝 VC Memos (Week of Feb 20 - 26)

"Powerpoint is a frustrating and time-consuming creation tool. Most people don’t have the skills to make their slides look amazing... Chronicle is a new form of storytelling software that will make creating and consuming presentations an easy, powerful, delightful, and collaborative experience. Instead of aligning text boxes and tweaking charts, Chronicle allows users to drop data or text into a block and magically turn it into a beautiful version of whatever they want."

"The discussion on [ClearCalcs] business metrics took care of itself with revenue and customer growth on a tear. Equally, our view on the market opportunity characterised by fragmented, incomplete and clunky incumbent solutions stood largely unchanged... [and] pleasingly, with the benefit of seeing the founders perform up close, we now have even greater conviction on the opportunity."

"Enzene is an innovation-driven biotech company, engaged in the development, manufacture and sale of pharmaceutical and nutraceutical products in India and global markets)... They are one of very few players globally to have developed a fully integrated continuous manufacturing platform which can deliver >5x higher yields compared to conventional batch manufacturing"

"Tom started Svix to make his vision for better webhooks a reality. In a short amount of time, and with a small team, the company deployed over 100 organizations into production, including a number of large enterprises and fast-growing startups. They also proved the product could scale, adding advanced functionality like retries, logging, verification, alerting on failures, and consumer endpoints."

"Finch’s mission is ‘To Make Employment Data Connected and Programmable’. To do this, Finch connects with over 200 employment providers covering nearly 90% of U.S. employers and standardizes access to their data in a secure and permissioned environment... Working with b2b clients has also helped Finch build a valuable data asset from over 20K employers who give Finch access to over 1.5 million employee records (and growing rapidly)!"

"The combination of games and crypto bring this to a whole new level: making the players truly become owners of the communities they are a part of. We think the most engaging games of the future will incorporate web3 to empower their users... We believe that the unique ownership and economic models web3 provides will revolutionize how people play online games."

"Large-scale pre-training has made AI dramatically more accessible, but software developers still face a series of hurdles (e.g. where to host models, what to do when they break, and how to build model differentiation over time) to get AI apps running in production, especially at scale. Clean abstractions and simple tools for LMs simply don’t exist... This is the problem Replicate aims to solve, by being something like the Vercel of machine learning."

"Today, Replicate provides an easy, fast way for anyone to run generative AI models in the cloud. Instead of battling with GPUs and keeping expensive AWS instances switched on, developers can deploy with just one line of code—in the cloud, billed by the second... the platform [also] allows companies to run their own custom models, which Replicate automatically packages, optimizes and deploys—shrinking the process from weeks to minutes..."

"Tracksuit surveys real humans about their purchasing behaviours and brand awareness for different consumer categories, collecting over 1 million data points per week. Tracksuit then surfaces benchmarked data to its users - marketing leads in charge of brands - who access it through beautiful, easy-to-share dashboards."

"Africa is booming. The continent is projected to have the fastest urban growth rate in the world, with Africa’s cities set to be home to an additional 950 million people by 2050... Jumba is providing a technology-enabled experience for construction material buyers in the industry, tackling issues such as the lack of transparent pricing, unreliable quality, fragmented vendor base, and inefficient logistics."

"By tying cryptocurrency to a simple link—bought and shared with just a couple of clicks, even if the recipient doesn’t already have a wallet— TipLink dramatically reduces the coordination required for payments. Information is stored within the URL, making the link itself the wallet—and ensuring it can be shared on any platform with only the sender knowing the key. It’s a fundamental shift, from pull (“send me your wallet address/SNS”) to push (“here’s a link”)."

"Quantum technology has undergone a second coming itself over the past two decades, which has made now the right time for entrepreneurs to start building the companies that will usher in the quantum revolution that was previously only the domain of science fiction authors. There is now the ability to engineer a quantum state and create quantum capability predictably and on demand."