Morning VC Brief丨2024.08.06

Morning VC Brief is an expert daily curation of tech and venture news. Feel free to forward; the sign-up is here

00. TL;DR

1/ No GPT-5 during OpenAI DevDay

2/ Another founding member John Schulman leaves OpenAI

3/ Bitcoin briefly tumbles below $50,000 for the first time since February

4/ AI chip startup Groq raises 640M Series D

5/ Space Systems Provider Muon Space Raise 56M Series B

6/ Digitally-native financial advisory Savvy Wealth Raise 26.5M Series A

7/ AI-powered data warehouse Roe AI Raise 3.5M Seed Round

8/ AI game test agent Nunu AI Raise 2M Pre-Seed Round

01. Tech News

1/ No GPT-5 during OpenAI DevDay

OpenAI confirmed that it won’t release its next major flagship model during DevDay, instead focusing on updates to its APIs and developer services. One of the reasons could be the increasing challenge of finding high-quality training data. More than 35% of the world’s top 1,000 websites now block OpenAI’s web crawler, according to data from Originality.AI.

OpenAI’s DevDay events this year will take place in San Francisco on October 1, London on October 30, and Singapore on November 21. Registration will cost $450.

2/ Another founding member John Schulman leaves OpenAI

John Schulman, one of the co-founders of OpenAI, has left the company for rival AI startup Anthropic. Also, OpenAI president Greg Brockman is taking an extended leave. Before leaving OpenAI, Schulman was the head of OpenAI’s alignment science efforts and a member of OpenAI’s safety committee. Now, only three of OpenAI’s 11 original founders remain: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Brockman and Wojciech Zaremba. Link

3/ Bitcoin briefly tumbles below $50,000 for the first time since February

Bitcoin dipped to $49,111.10 at one point — its lowest level and first time under $50,000 since February — after trading close to $70,000 a week ago. The moves follow a broader market sell-off that began last week, when a weaker-than-anticipated July jobs report renewed investor fears of a recession. Link

02. Venture News

1/ AI chip startup Groq raises 640M Series D

Groq is developing chips to run generative AI models faster than conventional processors. Meta chief AI scientist Yann LeCun will serve as a technical advisor to Groq and Stuart Pann, the former head of Intel’s foundry business and ex-CIO at HP, will join the startup as chief operating officer. Groq plans to deploy more than 108,000 LPUs by the end of Q1 2025.

This round was led by Blackrock with participation from Neuberger Berman, Type One Ventures, Cisco, KDDI and Samsung Catalyst Fund. The Company is now valued at $2.8 billion. Link

2/ Space Systems Provider Muon Space Raise 56M Series B

Muon Space is an end-to-end Space Systems Provider that designs, builds, and operates mission-tailored low-earth orbit (LEO) satellite constellations. Muon Space has now secured over $100 million in committed customer contracts in 2024 for its Halo LEO satellites. This round was led by Activate Capital with participation from Costanoa Ventures, Radical Ventures, and Congruent Ventures. Link

3/ Digitally-native financial advisory startup Savvy Wealth Raise 26.5M Series A

Savvy Wealth is building a platform aiming to make it easier for financial advisors to run their businesses independently. The fast-growing business that will exceed $1 billion in assets under management by the end of the year, representing 5x growth. This round was led by Canvas Ventures with participation from Thrive Capital, Brewer Lane Ventures and Index Ventures. Link

4/ AI-powered data warehouse Roe AI Raise 3.5M Seed Round

Roe AI is the next-generation data warehouse that uses AI to process unstructured data like natural language, documents, images, and structured tabular data. This round was led by Gradient Ventures with participation from Ardent Venture Partners, Y Combinator and Orange Collective. Link

5/ AI game test agent Nunu AI Raise 2M Pre-Seed Round

Nunu AI is developing generally capable agents that can navigate and act in any given virtual 3D environment, starting with applications in gaming and moving towards general 3D simulations and robotics. This round was invested by A16Z GAMES SPEEDRUN, Boost VC and Y Combinator. Link