Morning VC Brief丨2024.08.23

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/ Live-Shopping Startup Tilt raises $18M Series A

2/ AI Agent for Business Travel Otto raises $6M Seed Round

3/ Developer Tool Startup Depot raises $4.1M Seed Round

4/ Modular Nuclear Startup Deep Fission raises $4M Pre-Seed Round

5/ AI “Zoominfo“ Openmart raises $2.75M Seed Round

6/ AI Agent for Franchisors Harmonyze raises $2M Pre-Seed Round

7/ Largest US Direct Air Capture Plant Opens In Oklahoma

8/ Cruise’s Robotaxis Are Coming To Uber In 2025

01. Venture News

1/ Live-Shopping Startup Tilt raises $18M Series A

Tilt focus on live sales of fashion items. Tilt has cracked live shopping in the UK: Adding over half a million users within their first year of launch. This round was led by Balderton Capital. Link

2/ AI Agent for Business Travel Otto raises $6M Seed Round

Otto acts as a personal travel assistant for business travel, learning users preferences and offering tailored travel options. This round was led by Madrona with participation from Direct Travel, and more. Link

3/ Developer Tool Startup Depot raises $4.1M Seed Round

Depot speeds up container image builds and GitHub action workflows by up to 40x. Depot’s platform is now helping over 1,800 organizations, processing 1.3 million builds monthly. This round was led by Felicis with participation from Y Combinator, Aviso Ventures, Tokyo Black, and more. Link

4/ Modular Nuclear Startup Deep Fission raises $4M Pre-Seed Round

Deep Fission produces very safe and very low-cost nuclear power by bringing existing nuclear technology into deep rock a mile underground. This round was led by 8VC. Link

5/ AI “Zoominfo“ Openmart raises $2.75M Seed Round

Openmart uses AI to scrape data from public business filings, maps, customer reviews and other sources to aggregate a database of local businesses organized by type. This round was invested by Y Combinator, Rebel Fund, Afore Capital, and more. Link

6/ AI Agent for Franchisors Harmonyze raises $2M Pre-Seed Round

Harmonyze empowers franchisors to run exceptional and profitable networks with purpose-built AI agents. This round was led by Bowery Capital with participation from Focal.VC and numerous individuals from the franchise industry. Link

02. Tech News & Updates

1/ Largest US Direct Air Capture Plant Opens In Oklahoma

Denver-based Heimdal plans to extract at least 5,000 metric tons of CO2 out of the sky each year with its new Bantam project. According to the company, The Bantam project will be the most affordable U.S. DAC facility. Link

2/ Cruise’s Robotaxis Are Coming To Uber In 2025

Cruise has signed a multi-year partnership with Uber to bring its robotaxis to the ride-hailing platform in 2025. Uber has already partnered with Waymo on the ride-hail side of its operations in Phoenix since October 2023.