TLDR from Z

Hi! It’s been a while. The past few weeks have been crazy (peak deal season), and we’re five weeks out from Thanksgiving (aka the last few weeks before the GPs are back on vacation and no one is fundraising, supposedly).

Since we last connected, I was featured in Techcrunch’s list of New York’s Top VCs under 30! What an honor to be alongside so many friends:

Because of the article and its shoutout of this newsletter, we’re welcoming 2,000 new subscribers to the No GPs Allowed community. Scroll down past the VC News category to learn a little bit more about me (Z).

No GPs Allowed is meant to be the newsletter you go to when you want ALL of the VC industry news in the past week/few weeks, ALL of the fundraising announcements, ALL of the VC fund announcements, startup features, Twitter gossip, and more. Treat this like the excessively detailed catch-up-on-VC-newsletter that you come back to. If you’d like to see anything else in this newsletter, don’t hesitate to reply. All replies go straight to my inbox, and I have a stellar email platform (Shortwave), so I respond to everyone’s emails now so fast (I churned on and off of Superhuman 7 times).

I’m partnering with Cory at Parallel to bring you Lifework: a series of professional networking (work) + fun activity-based events (life)! At the time this is sent out, we’ll be amid our kick-off event: a consumer founder / VC breakfast :)

Last but certainly not least, I want to connect with engineers who specialize in / are obsessed with consumer AI. Reach out if you know a talented engineer looking to join a team as a co-founder or founding engineer.

And not to stir the pot before you get to the news but I agree:

Other than that, a ton of VC news (as usual). More below!

VC Industry News

• In Q3 2024, VCs invested $3.9 billion in generative AI startups across 206 deals, per PitchBook. (That’s not counting OpenAI‘s $6.6 billion round.) And $2.9 billion of that funding went to U.S.-based companies across 127 deals.

• Anthropic’s new AI model can control your PC

• Marc Andreessen says AI model makers are in ‘a race to the bottom’ and it’s not good for business

• This AI Pioneer Thinks AI Is Dumber Than a Cat: Yann LeCun, an NYU professor and senior researcher at Meta Platforms, says warnings about the technology’s existential peril are ‘complete B.S.’

• A.I. Isn’t Magic, but Can It Be ‘Agentic’? So-called agentic artificial intelligence doesn’t require a human to tell it what to do. At least, that’s the idea.

• Perplexity CEO Proposes Revenue Deals for Publishers After Lawsuit: Dow Jones sued the AI startup this week, alleging copyright infringement

  • CEO of Perplexity said the AI-powered search engine isn't trying to replace the news

• Cerebras, an A.I. Chipmaker Trying to Take On Nvidia, Files for an I.P.O.: The Silicon Valley company would be among the first A.I. companies to go public since the release of ChatGPT nearly two years ago.

• Reddit CEO says the platform is in an 'arms race' for AI training

• American venture capitalists are more likely to invest in AI than VCs in other countries are. It may seem like the whole world is going all in on AI right now, but the numbers tell a different story.

• OpenAI Is Putting Down Office Roots in New York

• Initialized Capital restructures, and lets multiple partners go

• The Celebrities Lending Their Voices to Meta’s New AI: the social media giant announced deals with Awkwafina, John Cena and others, who are allowing a likeness of their voices to be used with its AI assistant

• Sequoia’s Alfred Lin on the art and math of spotting outliers

• Lionsgate, Studio Behind ‘John Wick,’ Signs Deal With AI Startup Runway: Hollywood studio will give the tech company access to its library of movies and shows in exchange for a custom-built AI model

• Stripe Is Acquiring Crypto Startup Bridge For $1.1 Billion

• Venture Capital Is on the Verge of a New Role: Washington Insider: Investors are getting the ear of presidential nominees, but their industry has also been used as a punching bag in the election season

• How Three Former PayPal Guys Plan to Find Winners in Fintech: Infinity Ventures’ Jeremy Jonker discusses his firm’s approach to spotting comers in the once-hot sector now overshadowed by AI

• A Venture Capital Firm Does Something Rare: Give Money Back. CRV, based in Silicon Valley, plans to return to investors $275 million because the market for mature start-ups has soured.

• Andreessen Horowitz is renting a bunch of Nvidia GPUs to its portfolio companies

• 55% of companies say security risks are at a high—and AI has a lot to do with it, according to new data from Vanta

• SoftBank-backed startup Jellysmack is laying off staff and blaming Meta

Fundraising News (VC)

• Former Partners From Index, Bessemer, A16z Raise $350 Million For New VC Firm Chemistry

• Podcaster Harry Stebbings raises one of Europe’s biggest venture funds: British firm 20VC pulls in $400mn to invest in early stage tech start-ups

• Acrew Capital hits five years, raises $700M

• Benchmark is raising $170M for its latest partners-only fund

• Fidelity Investments Closes Fidelity Venture Capital Fund I at $250 Million

• Life sciences investor Dimension seeks to raise $500M second fund

• The Artemis Fund Raises $36 Million To Fund Diverse Tech Founders

• Mindful Venture Capital Closes $5 Million First Fund

• Pet-focused Vetted Capital targets $150M+ first-time VC fund

Fundraising News (Founders)

• VCs love using the AI meeting notepad Granola, so they gave it $20M

  • ZN’s POV: I love Granola. idk how I took meetings before I was using it!

• Mercor’s AI Interviewer Has Vetted 300,000 Job Candidates. Now It’s Valued At $250 Million

• Perplexity is reportedly looking to fundraise at an $8B valuation: if a deal happens with those terms, it would more than double Perplexity’s valuation from its $3 billion valuation when it raised from SoftBank over the summer.
  OpenAI closes $6.6 billion funding haul with investment from Microsoft and Nvidia (I know we already know this / it was everywhere

• Ghost, B2B retail inventory marketplace, raises a $40 million Series C led by L Catterton

• Towns raised $25.5 million from Andreessen Horowitz – The on-chain messaging platform launches today

• AI sales startup Clay is raising a new funding round at a $1.3 billion valuation, sources say

• Lorikeet, an AI customer service platform, comes out of stealth with $5 million in seed funding

• Former OpenAI technology chief Mira Murati to raise capital for new AI startup, sources say

• Braintrust raised a $36M Series A

  • Braintrust, which helps Airtable, Brex, Notion and Stripe build AI products, has raised $36M in a Series A led by a16z. The one-year-old startup offering LLM evaluations and monitoring is now valued at about $150M, a source tells (more from Forbes)

• Passionfroot is a marketplace for business-focused content creators looking for brand partnerships — and vice versa

• One Zero could be raising $100M

• Azra Games Secures $42.7 Million in Series A Funding, Leading the Charge in the Next Evolution of Mobile RPGs

• Bling It On: An AI Startup Turns Shoppers Into Jewelry Designers. Mariam Naficy made a name for herself as a sharp-eyed ecommerce founder. Now Reid Hoffman and other investors are backing her new retail startup that lets shoppers create their own jewelry, with a little help from AI.

• Lightmatter’s $400M round has AI hyperscalers hyped for photonic data centers

• Imprint, a co-branded credit card startup, closes $75 million Series C and boosts valuation to $600 million

• Legal tech startup Genie AI just raised $17.8 million in a Google Ventures-led round with this 13-slide deck

• Founded in 2020, Autone aims to forecast demand, and aid sales, while cutting waste and manual tasks. The company has now raised a $17 million Series A funding round, led by General Catalyst. Previous investors also participated, including Speedinvest, Y Combinator, Seedcamp, 2100 Ventures, Motier, Financière Saint James, and angels from LVMH, Sephora, and Moncler. The new funding takes the total raised for the company to $20 million, including a $3 million seed round led by Speedinvest.

• Artisan Raises $11.5 Million Seed Round To Launch AI Employee For Sales Teams

• Rogo, an AI startup focused on finance, raised its $18.5 million Series A

• AI startup Attention just raised $14 million to bring its natural language processing tech to sales calls

Startup Features: founder features, quotes, and more. I’ve put a sparkle emoji next to every founder I’ve met + love

• ✨ Swsh’s new photo-sharing app lets Gen Zers filter out red Solo cups and alcoholic drinks

• Twitter lore: If you’re invested in consumer AI you must follow Spotted in Prod on Twitter. The best account for recaps on the app charts, consumer app features, etc.

• Toy brand KiwiCo has surpassed $1 billion in lifetime revenue

• ✨ Daze, a creative, AI-powered messaging app for Gen Z, is blowing up prelaunch

• Investing In Pakistan’s Climate Change Pioneers With Sarmayacar

• ✨ Bonobos Co-Founder Puts New Twist on Creator Funds

• ✨Partiful launched a blog: The Guest List

• High Snobiety shared a list of their “current app obsessions”

• ✨ Amy Wu, founder of the AI-based mental health app Manifest, has a bold prediction for the next wave of tech. “Separately from the AI trend, I think so many people are seeing this loneliness epidemic that’s happening with Gen Z,” she said. “There is no doubt in my mind that there will be unicorns that emerge from those categories to address the loneliness epidemic.”

• The New Age Of Entrepreneurship: How Apex Is Redefining Self-Improvement

• In an era where artificial intelligence can clone anyone's face and voice with frightening accuracy, a new battlefront has emerged in the fight for digital identity protection. Leading this charge is Loti AI, a startup that's tackling the growing crisis of unauthorised AI-generated content and deepfakes head-on.

• Meet The MIT Professor With Eight Climate Startups And $2.5 Billion In Funding

• The AI app Soula seeks to improve healthcare access for pregnant women

Consumer-Specific News - subscribe to my other newsletter, Fan Behavior.

• Why the e.l.f. not?’ The beauty brand built an AI model to write social media comments

• Spotify now lets you create custom cover art for your playlists

• 2004 was the first year of the future

• Meet Hollywood’s AI Doomsayer: Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Actor says AI companies use movies and TV to make money without fairly compensating actors; industry should ‘get ahead of that flood’

  • AI sparks backlash from ABBA, Radiohead, and The Cure–thousands of artists sign letter protesting the use of their work to train robots

• TikTok is starting to help creators manufacture their own products

• Netflix just had a blockbuster quarter, and its Asia strategy had a big role to play in it: Netflix added over 5 million subscribers in the third quarter, beating analyst expectations. At 19%, Asia Pacific had the largest revenue growth rate of all regions this quarter.

• Did Apple Just Kill Social Apps?: Some app makers worry that a subtle change to the iPhone’s contact-sharing permissions could make it hard for them to get the fast growth they need to compete.

• Poshmark reverses decision to lower selling fees after sellers experience a drop in sales

• "I recently discovered a part of the internet where a bunch of cracked 18-22yr old indie hacker kids from no-name unis run bootstrapped mobile apps growth-hacked on TikTok. Each app has 100k+ monthly users and makes $1M-5M/yr. Never underestimate the kids." This tweet, which quickly went viral on VC Twitter and beyond, shed light on a new breed of young entrepreneurs who are quietly building multi-million dollar app empires outside the traditional Silicon Valley ecosystem. At the forefront of this movement are Blake Anderson (23 years old) and Zach Yadegari (17 years old), two entrepreneurs who exemplify the phenomenon Das described.

• MrBeast's $100M Amazon reality show may succeed despite controversy. But it could come back to haunt him.

Niche internet lore

If you’re in or adjacent to consumer VC and thought you could ignore the news of the Liam Payne’s tragic passing, you’d be mistaken. One Direction, while yes personal to me, also represents an era of the internet in line with the rise of Tumblr, Pinterest, Twitter stan culture, Reddit, etc.: fundamental consumer internet businesses that have redefined how VCs assess the quality, potential, and TAM of consumer products.

If you (I’m talking to consumer VCs) want to invest in companies as successful as a Pinterest, Reddit, Twitter, etc. you need to have an understanding of internet, meme, and pop culture.

Tweets to think about

Investor Feature: Zehra (me - hi!)

Welcoming all new subscribers! Here’s a fun little infographic I made with more information about myself, my background, and what I’m investing in at the moment. Excited to be connected and thanks for subscribing.

VC Theses & Startup Tips

Resources: Discounts + Tools

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listening (music) 🎧 Best Song Ever by One Direction

listening (podcast) 🎧 Empire, Episode 8. The Koh-i-noor Diamond

reading 📖 The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World

(re)watching 🎥 Encanto and National Treasure (having a Disney+ moment)

my favorite non VC / startup related tweets as of late