Who Got Funded? Week 2, 2024

Good morning, everyone! ☀️

It's time!!! The perfect moment has arrived for a bit of a redesign of this newsletter. 📤️

As you know, for the past 2 months I've been sending a weekly newsletter focused on highlighting the leading startup funding stories worldwide. It’s been a really intriguing journey for me, as I’ve encountered many startup stories I wouldn’t have discovered otherwise.

And perhaps that's precisely why I started this newsletter in the first place: my personal drive to learn more about the most exciting startup stories. From a personal standpoint, everything is positive. I am very satisfied with the outcome of this newsletter.

However, I've been reflecting about the way I structure the content of this newsletter, and I've realized that the current approach might not be the best one.

The main questions that I keep asking myself are:

• How am I different from a robot if I only send out a list without delving deeper into each startup story?

• At what exact point am I adding value?

• How am I different from a journalist if I merely share funding news without including my opinion? I'm not a journalist, so I shouldn't be competing with them.

If you are just looking for lists of top-funded startups, using databases like Crunchbase or Dealroom may be a much more effective way to explore this kind of structured data.

And for this reason, I am changing the way I present the information in this newsletter. It’s decided. I am applying the following criteria: less is more. ✌️

From now on, I will send out 4 startup stories each week, but I will go deeper into each story with the goal of sharing knowledge and opinions that may help and inspire other startup founders. Yeah! Let’s go! 🚀 

But please, let me ask you for a small favor in return. This is very, very important.

After you finish reading this newsletter, you'll find a link to a survey. I would be incredibly grateful if you could rate the content you've just read.

Thank you so much! 😘 

PRE-SEED
Amsterdam-based Firsty raises €1.1 million for simplifying mobile data access for travelers worldwide

This European startup just announced that they raised over €1 million in funding to provide travelers with instant access to cross-border mobile data connectivity, eliminating the need to switch SIM cards or data plans. You can visit their website here. It's called Firsty, and it's more like an app rather than a traditional mobile company. 📲 

I find the concept of avoiding the hassle of switching between (e)SIMs or data plans quite appealing. In fact, I just moved to Denmark, and changing my mobile provider has been a bit of a hassle.

As they state, their proposal "stands in stark contrast to the often excessive roaming charges that still prevail in the sector today”. So, essentially, they are claiming to be more affordable than other options when travelling abroad.

However, I would ask them the following questions:

• Is there a substantial demand for solutions to expensive roaming fees? I can just think of one recent time that this issue affected me, and it was when I landed in Switzerland, where European Union laws don't apply.

• How will this startup target travelers in their go-to-market strategy? How will their marketing initiatives reach people who are experiencing expensive roaming fees? I can’t think of an easy way of doing this.

The founders are ex-Adyen Technical Product Managers Vince Vissers and Gauthier Thierens.

The first investor include executives at dutch telecoms company KPN (Marcel Smits, Godert Vinkesteijn) and the former head of marketing at Uber and N26 (Patrick Stal).

You can read more about this deal here.

More pre-seed interesting stories:

• Sunrise AI secures pre-seed funding round led by Andrew Ng’s AI Fund. You can read more about this deal here. Andrew Ng is a prominent computer scientist, educator, and entrepreneur known for his contributions to machine learning, co-founding Coursera, and advocating for AI education.

• YC-backed African fintech Cleva, founded by Stripe and AWS alums, raises $1.5 million pre-seed. The round was led by 1984 Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm based in San Francisco. You can read more about this deal here.

SEED
CharacterX raises $2.8 million in seed funding for its AI Social Network

As the company states: “to summarize, CharacterX is not just a social platform; it's a catalyst for a human-AI synergy that will redefine how we connect, interact, and build democratic communities in the digital age…”.

Okay, okay. I agree that AI will redefine everything, but let's consider the facts here.

If I understand it correctly, CharacterX is an app where you can engage with AI characters through chatting and role-play. Their service includes “chat with AI partners, explore virtual relationships, and make new AI boy & girl friends”.

After reading those lines, I definitely feel old. 😂 

I think that I cannot fully understand their value proposition. They sell relationships with AI-generated characters. And what's the point of that? They are actually selling emotions. They help you feel less lonely by speaking with robots. Funny but scary at the same time. Don’t you agree?

The company is very active on X. You can follow their account here.

The round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, INCE Capital, and Spark Digital Capital. You can read more about this deal here.

More seed interesting stories:

• Health in Her HUE has closed a $3 million seed round to address health disparities for women of color. The round was led by Seae Ventures. HUE stands for “Heard and Understood Experiences”.

• Redactable, a New York-based AI-driven application designed for quick and permanent redaction of sensitive documents, has secured $5.5 million in seed funding. You can read more about this deal here.

SERIES A
FlutterFlow closes a $25.5 million Series A for its low-code mobile app dev platform

Even though AI tools represent a threat for low-code dev platforms, these kind of tools have gained momentum in recent years.

FlutterFlow, which is building a low-code platform for mobile app developers, announced that it has closed a $25.5 million Series A led by GV (formerly Google Ventures), Gradient Ventures (Google’s AI-focused venture fund), Xoogler Ventures and Y Combinator.

The platform has over 950k users (according to their website) and they claim to have around 10,000 self-service paying customers, which means, only 1.05% of their users are actually paying users.

The questions I would have for them are:

• What are the limitations of low-code development platforms (technically speaking)?

• How on earth did they manage to simplify the huge complexity of app development into a user-friendly web interface?

• How is FlutterFlow adapting to the AI wave?

You can read more about this deal here.

More Series A interesting stories:

• Vita Health secures $22.5 million to combat suicide and mental health. You can read more about this deal here.

• Zurich-based payment fintech Rivero bags €6.3 million Series A to fill a gap in the market for fraud recovery. You can read more about this deal here.

SERIES B AND LATER
Norwegian robotics company 1X bags €91 million Series B to produce androids to meet the world’s labor demand

This is such an exciting startup story. I'm a big fan of robots. 🤖 

Norway-based 1X, an AI and robotics company producing androids to benefit society and meet the world’s labor demand, announced it has raised €91 million in Series B funding with participation from EQT Ventures and other notable global investors. They already had investors such as OpenAI and Tiger Global on their cap table, so we can conclude that they have top-tier backers.

Three weeks ago, the company released a video featuring its EVE robot baking gingerbread cookies. I would certainly pay for a robot that can cook for me. Wouldn't you?

I don't think we can fully imagine what's coming with AI robotics. It's only a matter of time before human-like robots play a more active role in our lives.

You can read more about this deal here.

More Series B (and later) interesting stories:

• Andreessen Horowitz backs insurtech startup hyperexponential in $73 million round. You can learn more about this deal here. Founded in 2017, the company offers mathematical modeling software for the commercial insurance sector.

• D-Orbit raises $110 million in Series C round to further space logistics business. You can read more about this deal here. This is one of the largest funding rounds for a European space tech company.