Morning VC Brief丨2024.09.10

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/ Battery Tech Startup 24M raises $87M Series H at $1.3B

2/ Battery Material Startup 6K raises $82M Series E

3/ SMB-focused Bookkeeping Startup Finally raises $50M Series B

4/ AI Drug Discovery Startup Chai Discovery raises $30M Seed Round at $150M

5/ All-In-One Agreements Platform Agree raises $3M Pre-Seed Round

6/ Confluent acquires streaming data startup WarpStream

7/ Roblox Develops 3D-Gen Model

01. Venture News

1/ Battery Tech Startup 24M raises $87M Series H at $1.3B

24M provides affordable energy storage solution by a revolutionary battery manufacturing and product design technology set enabled by the 24M SemiSolid™ and Unit Cell manufacturing platform. This round was led by Nuovo+ with participation from Kyocera Corporation, ASAHI Kasei, and more. Link

2/ Battery Material Startup 6K raises $82M Series E

6K produces and innovates with UniMelt® microwave plasma technology for the localized production of critical materials. UniMelt is industrially operational and producing critical materials at scale today. This round was backed by Anzu Partners, Energy Impact Partners, LaunchCapital, Material Impact, and Volta Energy Technologies. Link

3/ SMB-focused Bookkeeping Startup Finally raises $50M Series B

Finally gives SMBs a full accounting & finance suite that allows their business to grow stress free. Since Series A, Finally has seen ARR growth of 300%. This round was led by PeakSpan Capital. Finally also secured a $150M credit facility from Encina. Link

4/ AI Drug Discovery Startup Chai Discovery raises $30M Seed Round at $150M

Chai Discovery develops AI foundation models that can predict the structure of biochemical molecules and reprogram how they interact, a process that is central to developing new medications. This round was Backed by Thrive Capital with participation from OpenAI, Dimension Capital, and more. Link

5/ All-In-One Agreements Platform Agree raises $3M Pre-Seed Round

Agree is on a mission to transform how contracts and payments come together with its AI-driven all-in-one agreements platform. This round was led by Better Tomorrow Ventures with participation from 8-Bit Capital, Everywhere Ventures, Expedite Ventures, and more.

02. Tech News & Updates

1/ Confluent acquires streaming data startup WarpStream

Confluent plans to use WarpStream’s cloud-native solution to fill out its portfolio by offering a new service (Confluent WarpStream) that can sit in between its fully managed Confluent Cloud and self-managed Confluent Platform. WarpStream launched just over a year ago and had a team of 13 at the time of the acquisition. WarpStream was backed by Greylock and Amplify Partners. Link

2/ Roblox Develops 3D-Gen Model

Roblox announced it is building a generative AI model to allow creators to more easily build 3D objects and scenes. Creators can opt in to allow their content to be used to train the new model. The model will also be available to the open source community. Link