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- đź“ť VC Memos (Week of Jun 5 - Jun 11)
đź“ť VC Memos (Week of Jun 5 - Jun 11)
New memos last week from a16z, Accel, Bessemer, Bain Capital, New Enterprise Associates, Salesforce Ventures, General Catalyst and Greylock Partners
The Memos...
Pomelo Care (Health)
Pomelo Care is a virtual maternity care program that supplements traditional pregnancy care with unlimited, customized support.
Raise: Series A | $33M
Investor Memo: a16z by Vineeta Agarwala
"Value-based care models are proliferating across healthcare, but maternity presents some particularly unique opportunities–and unique challenges. Unlike primary care, and unlike chronic disease management, the maternity care journey has a very clear, near-term endpoint, with a clear definition of success: Healthy delivery for mom and baby!."
Granica (AI/ML)
Granica reduces the cost to store and access data, while preserving its privacy to unlock it for AI initiatives.
Raise: Series A | $45M
Investor Memo: New Enterprise Associates by Peter Sonsini, Vanessa Larco, Mustafa Neemuchwala
"Granica's incredible breakthroughs help dramatically cut cloud costs. The company’s AI-enabled byte-granular inline data reduction of large-scale sensor, image and textual AI data losslessly reduces AI-related storage costs by up to 80%, running transparently in the background."
Blackpoint Cyber (cybersecurity)
Blackpoint Cyber leverages its real-world cyber experience and knowledge of malicious tradecraft to help MSPs safeguard their infrastructure and operations.
Raise: Growth Equity | $190M
Investor Memo: Accel by Nate Niparko, Christine Esserman, Graham Hutson
"For decades, security teams have played a cat-and-mouse game against intruders, protecting their evolving network surface area from adversaries and responding to attacks. While the largest, well-resourced enterprises in the world are still subject to an onslaught of attacks, small- and medium-sized businesses have become the new surface area for cybercriminals."
EvenUp (AI/ML)
EvenUp uses data and technology to help plaintiffs and attorneys achieve better legal outcomes.
Raise: Series B | $50.5M
Investor Memo: Bessemer Venture Partners by Sameer Dholakia, Byron Deeter, Aleeza Hashmi, Andrew Schmitt, Grace Ma
"EvenUp generates high-quality demand packages by leveraging AI to accurately review documents and extract relevant medical information and bills. Furthermore, EvenUp’s proprietary database leverages over 250,000 public verdicts and private settlements to inform its analysis of the case’s true merit and value."
Raise: Series B | $50.5M
Investor Memo: Bain Capital Ventures by Sarah Hinkfuss, Aaref Hilaly, Kristie Han, Abby Meyers
"Previously, it took paralegals and associates hours of work to painstakingly organize, extract and summarize information from documents, medical records, police reports and invoices. Now, with EvenUp, attorneys can achieve a 10x better result in terms of quality, speed, and cost. The product is a clear, early example of generative AI, combined with deep domain expertise."
Cohere (AI/ML)
Cohere empowers every developer and business to build incredible products with world-leading NLP technology while keeping their data private and secure.
Raise: Series C | $270M
Investor Memo: Salesforce Ventures by Rob Keith, Emily Zhao
“Cohere is uniquely poised to capture the enterprise AI market: the company has industry-leading foundational AI, has remained independent and cloud agnostic, ensures data security for its customers, and is backed by a top-tier team that has both strong technical background and enterprise experience. Customers have consistently referred to Cohere as one of the most advanced AI providers in the world.”
Contextual AI (AI/ML)
Contextual AI operates in the generative AI space with a focus on the enterprise.
Raise: Seed | $20M
Investor Memo: Bain Capital Ventures by Aaref Hilaly, Rak Garg
“They have already proven to have the two key skills most needed by any AI founder. One is the ability to recruit in a competitive market — in a very short time period, Contextual has grown to a dozen people, all outstanding technical talents with commercial and research experience in AI. The other is the ability to secure graphics processing units (GPUs), required for AI infrastructure, on favorable terms, which nowadays calls for more ingenuity than you might expect.”
Charm Industrial (AI/ML)
Charm Industrial designs, builds and operates a fleet of mobile fast pyrolyzers that convert ag and forest biomass residues into bio-oil for use in carbon removal and direct-reduced-iron steelmaking.
Raise: Series B | $100M
Investor Memo: General Catalyst by Hemant Taneja, Paul Kwan, Genevieve Kinney, Will McCreadie
“We are fast approaching the 1.5 degrees Celsius threshold predicted to tip the scale and cause 14 percent of Earth’s population to endure severe heat waves every five years that increase drought, hunger, and conflict. At General Catalyst, we are committed to doing something about it.”
LlamaIndex (AI/ML)
LlamaIndex is the central interface between LLMs and your external data.
Raise: Seed | $8.5M
Investor Memo: Greylock Partners by Jerry Chen, Saam Motamedi, Jason Risch
“Looking for ways to mitigate GPT-3’s limitations in working with personal data, he built LlamaIndex (fka GPT-Index) to bridge the data gap for personal projects. LlamaIndex is a data framework that provides data ingestion, data indexing, and a query engine for retrieval and synthesis of enterprise data for LLMs. All of these problems are solved by a performant and easy-to-use framework.”