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BLUF (Bottom Line Up Front): This is your weekly list of the latest deals and disrupters, insights and trends to keep you up-to-date on the startup scene.
💸 PayPal’s venture arm has joined a group of investors injecting $15M in Ume, a Brazilian payment services provider that caters to small- and mid-sized merchants. [Payments Dive]
🎓UC Berkeley grads have founded more venture-backed companies than any other university in the world, according to the 2024 PitchBook university rankings. [Berkley.edu]
🤖Amazon has hired Covariant’s founders – Pieter Abbeel, Peter Chen, and Rocky Duan – along with “about a quarter” of the startup’s employees. [TechCrunch]
🤏Pint-Sized Startups: The number of employees at companies launched since the pandemic is sharply lower, reflecting a new shift in the way people work. [WSJ]
🔒 Salesforce is acquiring data protection and management solutions provider Own for $1.9B – the company’s second acquisition this week. [Yahoo!finance]
🚧 Safe Superintelligence, the 3-month-old startup co-founded by OpenAI‘s former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, has raised $1B to help develop safe AI systems. [Reuters]
🦾 So far this year, 35% of US startup investment has gone to AI-related companies – the highest percentage on record, topping 2023 when OpenAI secured its $10B Microsoft-backed financing. [Crunchbase]
✈️Otto, an AI-powered startup focused on business travel, has raised $6m in a seed funding round. [FinTech]
👉You.com has raised a $50M Series B led by Georgian, with participation from Salesforce Ventures, NVIDIA, Gen Digital, SBVA (formerly Softbank Ventures Asia), DuckDuckGo, Day One Ventures, and others, bringing their total funding to $99M. [You.com]
🤝Calif.-based Agree.com, an agreements platform that integrates money movement, has raised $3M in pre-Seed funding led by Better Tomorrow Ventures. [finsmes]
🩺Virtual care provider Vesta Healthcare has secured an investment of $65M alongside a new debt financing in a Series C funding round. [Yahoo!finance]
👨🏻💼👩💼 Oyster, a San Francisco-based provider of a solution to employ, pay, and care for distributed teams, raised $59M in Series D funding. [finsmes]
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Your weekly list of the latest deals and disrupters, insights and trends to keep you up-to-date on the startup scene.
Your weekly list of the latest deals and disrupters, insights and trends to keep you up-to-date on the startup scene.
Your weekly list of the latest deals and disrupters, insights and trends to keep you up-to-date on the startup scene.
Your weekly list of the latest deals and disrupters, insights and trends to keep you up-to-date on the startup scene.