Morning VC Brief丨2024.09.02

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/ Modular Nuclear Power Plants Last Energy raises $40M Series B

2/ Advance Precision Cancer Therapies Noetik raises $40M Series A

3/ Social Music Platform Turntable Labs raises $8.2M Seed Round

4/ AI-Powered Photos App Vybe raises $4.75M Seed Round

5/ Creator Monetization Platform Time Fun raises $3M Seed Round

6/ Amazon Hires Covariant Founders

01. Venture News

1/ Modular Nuclear Power Plants Last Energy raises $40M Series B

Last Energy is a full-service developer of 20 MWe micro-nuclear power plants. Last Energy works to deploy its first plant, targeting a 2026 online date and already has $25 billion in contracts. This round was led by Gigafund with participation from First Round Capital, Quiet Capital, and more. Link

2/ Advance Precision Cancer Therapies Noetik raises $40M Series A

Noetik is an AI-native biotech company leveraging self-supervised machine learning and high-throughput spatial data to develop next-generation cancer therapeutics. This round was led by Polaris Partners with participation from Khosla Ventures, Wittington Ventures, Breakout Ventures, and more. Link

3/ Social Music Platform Turntable Labs raises $8.2M Seed Round

Turntable Labs allows music fans, coworkers, and other communities to gather, DJ together, and interact in a playful virtual setting. This round was led by Founders Fund with participation from Elizabeth Street Ventures, 468 Capital, and ex-Facebook-led f7 Ventures, and more. Link

4/ AI-Powered Photos App Vybe raises $4.75M Seed Round

Vybe aims to revolutionize how friends create and share photos together. The app transforms your photos into vibrant, creative visions using cutting-edge AI. This round was led by Stellation Capital with participation from Scribble Ventures, Coalition Operators, Neo, and Blueprint FTC. Link

5/ Creator Monetization Platform Time Fun raises $3M Seed Round

Time Fun is a tokenization platform built on the Ethereum and helps creators tokenize their time. This round was led by BH Digital with participation from Coinbase Ventures, Zee Prime Capital, Palm Tree Crew, and more.

02. Tech News & Updates

1/ Amazon Hires Covariant Founders

Amazon is hiring three of the founders from Covariant, a Bay Area startup that develops AI for advanced warehouse robotics systems. As part of the arrangement, Amazon will receive a non-exclusive license to Covariant’s AI models. Three co-founders Peter Chen, Pieter Abbeel, and Rocky Duan and about a quarter of the company’s employees are expected to join Amazon.

Covariant, founded in 2017, focuses on AI-powered robotics systems, which are based on a platform that it calls the “Covariant Brain.” Covariant is backed by Index Ventures, Amplify Partners, Radical Ventures, and more. Link

2/ LAION Released New Training Dataset

The research org LAION that created the data used to train Stable Diffusion released new dataset which has been “thoroughly cleaned of known links to suspected child sexual abuse material (CSAM).

Re-LAION-5B, is actually a re-release of an old dataset, LAION-5B — but with “fixes” implemented with recommendations from the nonprofit Internet Watch Foundation, Human Rights Watch, the Canadian Center for Child Protection and the now-defunct Stanford Internet Observatory. Link