Not Another Fucking Newsletter

Happy Tuesday from Traded VC!

This week is starting off good: Elon Musk claims that xAI will open source Grok, Memecoins are making waves and Sam Altman’s Worldcoin isn’t going to make it in Spain.

Let’s get to the deals.

🧠 Dopamine Dealflow

Small Dopamine

• Turkey’s phone market is f*cked 🤷🏻

  A new iPhone in Turkey will cost you around $3,000 (thanks a lot, Reis). Getmobil is here to help you out 🔥 The startup is basically a second-hand market for legit phones and raised $4M, led by Dutch Founders Fund 🇳🇱 Tebrikler @mehmetuygunn 👏 read more

• Full swing ⛳

  PGA TOUR, EP Golf Ventures & Powerhouse Capital invested in Pro Shop, a media business connecting golf with mainstream culture 🏌🏻 The startup was founded by @chadmumm (ex-Vox Media CCO), Joe Purzycki (Puck Media CEO) & David Miller (PGA Tour lead media lawyer) 💪 read more

• WhatsApp founder ❇

  Legend Jan Koum (WA co-founder) leads the $10M round of SuperAGI, a startup with the ambition to build a full-stack AGI platform based on LAMs 🔥 Jan Koum invested through Newlands VC (remember the secretive VC?) run by him and ex-Sequoia partner Michael Abramson 🤫 read more

• Crypto corner💎

  Eclipse Labs raised $50M co-led by Hack VC and Placeholder 💰 The firm is basically developing an Etherum layer-2 solution using the Solana Virtual Machine 🟪 read more

High Dopamine

• Another FTX sell 🙄

  So Pantera Capital ($5.2B crypto fund) is looking to raise funds to buy up to $250M worth of Solana tokens from FTX 🤝 Obv, FTX is trying to free up funds for creditors without putting immediate pressure on the token's price 🪙 read more

• Samsonite 🧳

  KKR, Carlyle & CVC are looking to bag a take-private deal with Samsonite. Rn, they're publicly listed in HK with a market cap of $5.5B 💰 read more

• Audi takeover 🏎

  Audi is buying up the Sauber F1 Team 🏁 Good to finally see good engineers on the team 👍 read more

• Saudi Arabia 📈

  Saudi Arabia just transferred an 8% stake in Aramco to the PIF (baller sovereign wealth fund). The stake is worth $163.6B 🤯...did someone say potential public offering? 👏 read more

🐬 Deep Dive - Your favorite new co-worker

AI ⚠️ AI ⚠️ AI ⚠️. If the word artificial followed by intelligence is something you cannot take anymore, please do not read further. Today, we are covering Ema, a new San Fran-based startup, aiming to create a universal AI employee. 

Ema, which stands for Enterprise Machine Assistant, is a big hit with investors, pulling in $25M with a baller cap table. The round was led by Accel and joined in by Silicon Valley bigwigs such as former Meta Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang, and Snowflake Chief Executive Sridhar Ramaswamy. 

So, a startup building a gen AI tool for enterprise. I’ll say it seems like a dime a dozen. So why the hype? Well, that comes from the combination of the founders, traction, and the above-mentioned reputable investors. 

Ema was founded by two heavy hitters from India 🇮🇳, Surojit Chatterjee, and Souvik Sen. Chatterjee served as Chief Product Officer at Coinbase, leading up to its IPO, and founded the mobile ads team at Google. He was also the Head of Product at e-commerce firm Flipkart, combo of Product, Ads, and E-commerce is usually a KO.

Souvik Sen, Ema’s Head of Engineering, previously held the title of VP of Engineering at Okta where he oversaw data, machine learning, and devices. Before that, he was at Google, where he was the Engineering Lead for data and machine learning. 

Making these two a great Jobs & Wozniak type match, which investors eat up.

Although their customer base is not public, it has been confirmed that the list includes companies such as Envoy Global, TrueLayer, and Moneyview. 

What's interesting about Ema is that it uses about 30 large public language models, including GPT 4, GPT-3.5-turbo, Claude 2.1, Gemini, Mistral-S and Llama2, and small in-house language models. Meaning it cuts across different LLMs in order to get better results,a novel turn from previous ChatGPT wrappers. 

Is Ema made to take your job? Ofc not 😉. “Our goal is to automate on the mundane tasks that employees do on a day to day basis in every enterprise…to free them up to do more valuable and more strategic work.”

Now, get back to the grind 💌