i'm a venture girl in an AI-slop world
DYI-baby tech, the holy grail of SMEs, defense tech heating up, Apple's liquid glass, AI slops.
Hi friends,
I took some well-deserved time off after an intense 13 weeks working with pre-seed companies we invested in. Went to Greece, rediscovered the childhood bliss of reading one book a day until my eyes hurt, and made sure that everyone watching my Instagram stories knew how fast I read because that is the only thing I can flex on social media right now.
My first day back at work, I stared at the 200+ unread emails between newsletters and work stuff, and thought of all of those people who have advised me to use Superhuman to be faster, and realised that I’m no different from my mother, who doesn’t trust online banking.
It’s weird to work in venture capital at the moment, I am not going to lie. When I first entered this industry, I used to be able to catch up to the latest deals in one sitting. Now it takes three times as long to do it.
Word must have leaked, I’ve been pitched already four times by companies who are building AI scouting agents, AI-powered analysis, or anything promising to replace the stuffy, mechanical work of reading through hundreds of news and picking the ones that stand out the most.
I am sure that are ways to automate it. There are probably a billion videos on YouTube about to be edited by tech bros on this, but let’s be honest. With an impending World World III and a climate crisis on the horizon, no email is really that urgent.
But that’s not the only issue. There is very little good quality content that I can process, because there is so much sloppy content occupying my head, and I can’t be the only one feeling it. I thought about this when my dear friend, colleague and a Red Dot-award winning designer you should know, Carlotta, said that the level of AI-generated content we are consuming reminds her of the flood of cheap plastic junk the world churned out in the ‘90s.
All that cheap and shiny plastic we bought, consumed and thrown away, got us in the fantastic position now — if you are European — of having to sip water bottles from the most diabolical, non-sense bottle cap. FYI: VCs have been on the hunt for any kind of lab-made bacteria that can break all of that plastic. (I saw at least 3 companies doing this last year).
Not even a Dune-sized worm could swallow the gigantic amount of plastic that the world has produced. I am pretty sure that we will be facing the same issue soon when it comes to AI-slop.
If this is your first time reading, I’m Virginia—also known as Vixi—and this is my backlog: It’s usually a mix of tech insights from my perspective as a venture capital investor and some gossip that I would probably talk about if we had a quarterly sync to catch up.
The Dealflow
Meta is doing what Meta does. Poaching talent, setting a new research-lab to compete with its rivals and buy out its impending (or imaginary) threat in a smart way, so they avoid getting under the skin of already angry regulators, and this week was all about the big, fat Scale AI deal. First of all, Scale AI is a data-labeling startup that uses contract workers — sometimes not in the most ethical way — to label images and data that can be used for AI and Big Tech companies.
Meta will pay $14.3 billion for a 49% stake, which is the most the company has ever paid for any company outside of WhatsApp. The deal has stirred some controversy not only for its size, but also for its consequences. On the one hand, we have a public company with already a huge power circling around regulations to increase its own power with a semi-acquisition. Microsoft got away with it with OpenAI, although with some regrets now, so I can’t blame Zuck for pushing this boundary.
Scale AI’s massive valuation is connected to the solid customers pipeline that the company has built. Amongst these customers: OpenAI, xAI, Microsoft and Google, who will part ways for obvious reasons.
Overall, it’s a big deal for everyone, literally. Alexander Wang, not the designer, the 28-year-old baby face tech nerd who co-founded ScaleAI and rose to prominence over the past 18 months, just became head of the newly founded Super Intelligence lab that Meta has created to compete in the A.I. race, and now has voting rights on his company, which by the way — he did not have before.
Accel, one of the funds that had previously invested in the company, will make $2.5B from this deal. You will remember this fact because the same AI-generated text breaking down how much you could have made if you had been an angel investor in Scale AI is circulating around social media to lure people to become angel investors. As your friendly venture capitalist, I want to level with you. Accel would have not let you in that cap table even if you had brought Jesus to build that AGI.
I’m happy for both Meta and Scale AI. They certainly have in common a fear of losing the AI race that is not like the others. Despite its exponential growth, Scale AI was starting to be squeamish about the space heating up.
Newcomer reported that networking startup, Handshake, decided to go into the business of human-curated data, once it noticed that companies like ScaleAI were recruiting aggressively on their platform to find PhDs who could fine-tune their models. It was then they decided to explore the space themselves.
On an important note and the one that is really pissing me off this week because I know it will make my experience on the app insufferable, Meta is also breaking the promise of former Whatsapp founders to never bring “[..] ads, games or gimmicks” to its app. The company announced on Monday that it will be bringing ads to its app. It will initially be on the Updates section of the add – the one where some of your friends or family members share their updates as if they were on Instagram.
Vibe everything, not just coding. Vibe hacking has become a problem and cybersecurity experts are calling companies to take the appropriate measures. One example is a major US food distributor that was targeted in a cyberattack that disrupted its operations. The other one was Uk-based retailer M&S, which was in total shutdown recently.
It’s becoming quite the issue — and cybersecurity startups are heating up. There was Maze, a London-based company that raised $25M in series A, and Horizon3.ai, a six-year-old San Francisco startup that has developed an automated cybersecurity service that simulates real cyberattacks using AI to find and exploit vulnerabilities so security teams can fix them before they’re breached. They raised a $100 million Series D. But nothing like the Israeli Cyera, a data security company, that raised $540 million in Series E funding at a $6 billion valuation, reaching around $1.25 billion in total funding, including a $300 million Series D round last fall at a $3 billion valuation.
A company was able to reproduce concentrated breast milk in a lab and raise $2M in a mix of equity and grants to scale their operations and focus on other proteins. But that’s not the main baby-tech news of the week.
Remember that startup I told you that was doing DNA editing and playing God? It just pushed its media frenzy with another controversy. Crafting your own baby. Nucleus Genomics is offering IVF patients to ‘pick’ which traits they can manipulate for their embryos. On the press-release of the new business stream, the founder went into detail on the pain of watching his parents losing their daughter and his sister to a rare disease inspired him to do a pick-and-choose eugenics McDonalds totem. It reminded me a little bit of Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes’ own sad story about her desire to eradicate all diseases in the world due to her traumatic experience of losing her uncle to cancer. I must say that the interface is giving very “The Sims 1”, and not in a good way.
On the DNA front, it’s also quite interesting how we have not learned from 23andme, the famous company that probably supplied a gigantic number of creepy, Silicon Valley coded gifts to tech bros a few years ago, valued billions, that was facing bankruptcy and a huge legal battle just a few days ago, with customers refusing to give rights – and rightly so – to sell their personal data. Just last week, it was announced one of the founders will be able to buy back the company for $305M.
Apple had to work hard to come up with something equally interesting as a new Siri, given that it failed to deliver it. Marketing always works, and who else is better at marketing than Apple? We got a Spike Jonze-directed short featuring Pedro Mascal for AirPods, a feature on how Ben Stiller edited one of Apple TV’s most successful shows, Severance, which we know it was probably not true, and most definitely not edited by Ben Stiller. But most importantly, Apple unveiled Liquid Glass, something that sounds like a Glossier perfume, but it’s really a genius marketing way to describe the new seamless user experience across all Apple devices.
After many years in stealth (or plotting Montecristo revenge), Snapchat or Snap is finally ready to come back to the smart glasses game. During an event, its CEO and co-founder – and I may add Mr Miranda Kerr – Evan Spiegel unveiled that they are ready to ship a new generation of smart glasses, which will not be focused on content creating for the Meta verse, but rather on practical things such as real-time translation, or assembling shopping lists. Given that no details were shared on production plans or retail prices - most likely to keep a
Mr. Zucksomeone to steal another good idea away from them — I presume that this media frenzy is to bump up investors confidence after a sluggish few years on the market. I’m not a fan of the glasses, Snapchat or Evan Spiegel. I would, however, love to see someone to compete with Meta’s soon-to-be army goggles, and I love a catfight. I’ll keep watching.Lithuanian-based startup Sintra raised $17M in seed funding to accelerate its mission to empower SMEs in AI. The company was founded over a year ago, serving more than 40,000 companies with “employees that never sleep”, as their front page reveals, and projecting to $12M ARR. Targeting SMEs has always been a golden egg that VCs have been chasing, especially in Italy, where there is one of the highest concentration of SMEs globally. On a side note, I still have to meet a founder building tools for SMEs with actual, relevant past experience in an SME.
On the same front, Sunrise Robotics, a Slovenian factory automation startup, raised $8.5m Plural led, joined by Tapestry, Seedcamp, Tiny.vc and Prototype Capital. The company is aiming to make robotics in manufacturing more accessible to companies that are not necessarily of large size, which are usually the type of company that can justify the big cost of a robotics infrastructure. Unrelated to this, this is the first time I’ve seen a good branding and website for a robotics company.
I think about space a lot. Especially about how long it takes from data to be processed from and sent back from space, and how Elon Musk is dying to make money off that. It’s a big deal considering that this data is extremely relevant for a lot of things we do on Earth. Unfortunately a lot of them are used for warfare, but it’s still very important. For this reason, technologies in reducing time on in-space computing has been heating up over the past few years. A notable company worth mentioning is Aethero, a San-Francisco based company that is building hardware and software for a new generation of chips and computing that can function directly in space. They have raised $8M last week, already shopping around for potential partners and shipping off its latest technology to space in 2025.
I must admit that I was initially turned off by the AI slop. The majority of the content that I see on my Instagram unfortunately is a bunch of AI-generated attractive girls doing call-to-action campaigns for their Only Fans accounts, or non-sense videos with all anthropomorphic cats in weird, toxic relationships (is it just me? I don’t even love cats.) Every time I watch this type of content, I’m always wondering why would anyone pay to generate something like that. Well, we got our answer this week. Because it’s cheap. Betting platform Kalshi paid an AI-filmaker (it’s a thing now) to generate a 2-minute ad with AI-generated videos that was aired during the NBA finals. It cost 95% less than a traditional advertising video (20K) and even though The Verge called it AI-nonsense – which it is – I’m curious to know how the average viewer perceived it. Probably like a teaser for any Mr Beast’s video.
LaurelAI, An AI time-keeping company raised $100M at Series C, which is very exciting for them, but I could not care less — I just know I will soon be forced to time-keep my working hours given that there is a tool now to do so, and I’m unfortunately filled with hate.
I’m not in hospitality or travel tech, but I am intrigued by Holidu’s acquisition strategy. Holidu is a Germany scale-up founded in 2014 and that offers a rental technology platform, which means that you can mostly rent spaces for holidays, but not expanding on more. They have recently raised $46M and have been on an acquisition spree the last few years by consolidating their rental portfolio (acquiring a French rental platform) and their booking infrastructure, by acquiring a French Rental company, Cybivision. I find it quite interesting as they play alongside platforms like Airbnb and Booking that dominate the market, however, the latter have struggled to focus on the underlying infrastructure or customer experience that it requires to win.
Elon Musk is suing a former employee working on the Octopus humanoid team who apparently went and founded a Y Combinator company developing humanoid hands technology. Elon is famous for doing these type of things, appropriating other people’s ideas, but of course he hates it when people do it to him.
Speaking of the Octopus humanoid. It wasn’t enough to witness Kim Kardashian flirting with one. I’ve noticed that content creators are making unboxing videos on them, that are somewhat on the edge of alluring sexual interactions with them. If you’ve read my humanoids deep dive [linked below] you know how I feel about the design of them.
The line between defense and technology has always been very thin, at times even invisible, and that’s where we are at now. The Wall Street Journal reported that tech leaders are easily and happily switching to military uniforms. Palantir and Meta Platform’s CTOs – Shyam Sankar and Andrew Boz Bosworth - will be part of the newly established Army Innovation corps. They will be officially part of the army as lieutenants, but they won’t need to participate to habitual physical training, however, they will do need to join some physical tests, which is what’s worrying them the most. They will work remotely and around 120 ours a year, which doesn’t seem a lot of time to me for someone who is in charge of ruling the world.
However, the two big pieces of news that came out on defense tech this week are: the 600M investment that Spotify founder Daniel Ek chipped in defense tech startup, Helsing, and the fact that OpenAI just closed $200M U.S. defense contracts for a new initiative called OpenAI for Government. Ew.
I’m okay with my weird internet searches, but perhaps not everyone feels the same. and despite Meta’s spending $14B to hire a 28-year-old for their Super Intelligence Lab, it didn’t occur to them that users would probably not be interested in publicly sharing all their cringey and very private searches and prompts they are generating with the MetaAI app. I’m not going to lie, I’m trying hard to understand how to get around it, so I can see those prompts because it’s giving boomer-posting-google-searches-as-their-facebook-status, and I am here for this kind of content.
📱UX, U-Why?
The other night I noticed that Glovo is now asking me to add my friends on there to see what they are ordering. I presume that they think I would get inspired to order myself what they are eating, when in reality we are all using this app to order hungover food or lazy meals. Or is it just me? I believe this is part of a higher trend. I’ve also noticed that Airbnb is pushing to add friends on the platform, and using badges of past trips on my profile like a passport stamp.
Every tech company wants to be a social media company. Except for the only one who could. You know who I am talking about.
That’s all for now! Thank you for reading as always 💌
A very useful newsletter. Keep going!