Startup Monday: Latest tech trends & news happening in the global startup ecosystem (Issue 90- June 3)

11 min readJun 3, 2023

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1.MassRobotics Healthcare Robotics Catalyst Program Opens Applications for Cohort 3, Presented by Festo, Mitsubishi Electric Automation, Novanta, and MITRE

BOSTON, MA / ACCESSWIRE / May 31, 2023 / MassRobotics, Festo, Mitsubishi Electric Automation, Novanta, and MITRE are calling on startups in the healthcare robotics space to apply to the third Healthcare Robotics Startup Catalyst program 2023–24 and celebrating the end of their current cohort 2022–23.

This program provides healthcare startups with the opportunity to showcase innovative healthcare and robotics solutions and compete for a chance to join a world-class accelerator program. The program’s objective is to advance healthcare robotics companies by providing the connections, guidance, and resources they need to grow and succeed. The selected startups will be guided by senior-level mentors from organizing companies and supported with connection to potential customers, investors, suppliers, marketing and more. Additionally, the selected startups will find support within MassRobotics’ Healthcare Robotics Working Group, comprised of a U.S. cluster of corporate, academic, government, startup, and venture capital volunteers.

The healthcare industry is rapidly evolving, and robotics has become an integral part of modern healthcare. With the growing demand for healthcare services and technological advancements, the healthcare robotics market presents significant opportunities for improving patient care, reducing healthcare costs, and increasing efficiency across various areas of healthcare.

The program is open to early-stage startups with a healthcare, robotics, AI, or IoMT focus within the scope of the challenge. Selected startups will receive access to key players and collaborating corporates, innovation centers, and engineering teams. Additionally, they will receive introductions to investors, contract manufacturing firms, and suppliers. They will also have access to loaners, free components, and prototyping and testing resources. The program also includes media and marketing support, as well as potential participation in trade shows with mentor organizations.

2. China’s Baidu launches $145 million venture capital AI fund

SHANGHAI, May 31 (Reuters) — Chinese search giant Baidu Inc will set up a venture capital fund of 1 billion yuan ($145 million) to back start-ups focused on content generated by artificial intelligence applications, it said on Wednesday.

The company will also launch a competition for developers to build applications off its ERNIE large language model (LLM) or integrate the model into their existing products, it added.

Chinese tech companies have raced to release their own LLMs following the dramatic success of ChatGPT, the AI-powered chatbot released by Microsft-backed (MSFT.O) OpenAI.

Almost 80 organizations in China have launched their own LLMs since 2020, with releases this year slightly exceeding those of the United States, a report showed this week.

In March, Baidu unveiled Ernie Bot, its own AI-powered LLM. E-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding Ltd (9988.HK) was among the other Chinese companies that followed quickly.

3.Measurabl, an ESG platform for real estate, raises $93M

Measurabl, a startup developing a platform for environmental, social and governance (ESG) data in the real estate space, today announced that it raised $93 million in a Series D funding tranche co-led by Energy Impact Partners and Sway Ventures.

The round, which Measurabl CEO Matt Ellis described as oversubscribed, brought the company’s total raised to more than $170 million. Moderne Ventures, WVV, Suffolk Construction, Broadscale, Camber Creek, Salesforce Ventures, Building Ventures, Constellation Technology Ventures, Concrete Ventures, RET Ventures, Colliers and Lincoln Property Company were among the others participating.

“This funding allows Measurabl to further enhance its market-leading ESG technologies, expand to new geographies and ensure the real estate industry has the investment grade data necessary to transition to a sustainable, profitable future for all,” Ellis told TechCrunch in an email interview.

Measurabl, founded in 2013 by Ellis, the former director of sustainability solutions at CBRE, the commercial real estate services and investment firm, is riding the wave of startups in the ESG sector attracting serious venture backing. Measurabl offers tools for managing, benchmarking, reporting and tracking the sustainability of a real estate business, from building-level operations to boardroom and capital markets activities.

Measurabl’s tech can automate the collection of electricity, water, fuel, district and waste data from utilities, for example. Or it can maintain social and governance documents alongside environmental data.

4. Toyota adds $2.1B to its US battery factory expansion plans

Toyota will spend an additional $2.1 billion to build a new battery plant in North Carolina, the latest sign that the automaker is attempting to catch up with an industry that has embraced the move to electric vehicles.

The Japanese automaker also announced Wednesday it will build its first U.S.-made electric SUV at its Kentucky factory, starting from 2025. The three-row car will use batteries supplied by Toyota’s North Carolina factory.

At the outset, the news suggests that Toyota is strengthening its commitment to EVs. Historically, the company has lagged behind other automakers in announcing new EV models, instead supporting hydrogen-based vehicles. But earlier this year, Toyota said it plans to introduce 10 new battery-powered vehicles, with a target of 1.5 million EVs sold per year by 2026.

The battery plant in North Carolina is part of the company’s renewed pledge toward electrification — albeit it’s not one committed to only all-electric vehicles. Of the six production lines slated to go live when production begins in 2025, only two will be dedicated to all-electric EVs. The other four will be for hybrid EVs.

Toyota hasn’t yet shared the expected gigawatt-hour capacity of its plant. In the past, the company has said it could produce enough batteries for 1.2 million vehicles per year.

The increased capital spend into a U.S. battery factory signals that the government’s incentives to boost battery manufacturing nationally is working. The Inflation Reduction Act, signed into law in August 2022, includes incentives to produce batteries in the U.S. The result has been a slew of commitments from automakers domestic and international — from Ford and General Motors to BMW and Hyundai — to get production up and running on U.S. soil in the next few years.

5. Apple touts $1.1 trillion in App Store commerce in 2022, with $104B in digital sales

Ahead of Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference next week, the company is offering an update on its app ecosystem with the release of a new report detailing app earnings over the course of last year. In the analysis, released today, Apple says its App Store ecosystem generated $1.1 trillion in developer billings and sales in 2022, 90% of which was commission-free — a metric it likes to tout to downplay the growing complaints about the high cost of doing business on a marketplace that generally takes a 15% to 30% commission on in-app purchases and paid downloads, with some exceptions.

This $1.1 trillion breaks down as $910 billion in total billings and sales from the sale of physical goods and services, $109 billion from in-app advertising and $104 billion for digital goods and services.

The figures are a sizable increase from 2019 data, when Apple said the App Store had facilitated $519 billion in commerce, with then “just” $61 billion coming from digital goods and services.

6. NestAway, once valued at over $225 million, sells for $11 million

Proptech firm Aurum is acquiring NestAway, a once high-flying Indian startup operating in the same space, for up to $10.9 million, in a deal that marks a near complete erosion in value for the startup’s investors.

Eight-year-old NestAway raised $115 million over the years and was valued at $227 million in a funding round in 2019. The startup counts Sequoia Capital India, Tiger Global, Goldman Sachs, Yuri Milner and Chiratae Ventures among its investors.

Aurum, which earlier acquired a unit of NestAway for about $6.8 million, said it will invest $3.6 million to stabilize NestAway’s business. “This capital infusion in NestAway is a testament to Aurum PropTech’s conviction in India’s $20-billion Rental Housing market,” Aurum said in a stock exchange filing.

NestAway’s revenue shrank to $3 million in 2022, down from $9.5 million two years earlier.

The erosion in NestAway’s value can at least be partially attributed to COVID. The home rental platform NestAway features 18,000 properties on its platform, down from 50,000 before the pandemic.

“When we started NestAway, our vision was to revolutionize the way people live in cities by providing them with convenient, affordable and hassle-free housing solutions,” said Jitendra Jagadev, founder of NestAway, in a statement. “Over the years, we have grown and expanded, serving thousands of customers, becoming a trusted brand in the PropTech industry.”

7. Lightmatter’s photonic AI hardware is ready to shine with $154M in new funding

Photonic computing startup Lightmatter is taking its big shot at the rapidly growing AI computation market with a hardware-software combo it claims will help the industry level up — and save a lot of electricity to boot.

Lightmatter’s chips basically use optical flow to solve computational processes like matrix vector products. This math is at the heart of a lot of AI work and currently performed by GPUs and TPUs that specialize in it but use traditional silicon gates and transistors.

The issue with those is that we’re approaching the limits of density and therefore speed for a given wattage or size. Advances are still being made but at great cost and pushing the edges of classical physics. The supercomputers that make training models like GPT-4 possible are enormous, consume huge amounts of power and produce a lot of waste heat.

“The biggest companies in the world are hitting an energy power wall and experiencing massive challenges with AI scalability. Traditional chips push the boundaries of what’s possible to cool, and data centers produce increasingly large energy footprints. AI advances will slow significantly unless we deploy a new solution in data centers,” said Lightmatter CEO and founder Nick Harris.

“Some have projected that training a single large language model can take more energy than 100 U.S. homes consume in a year. Additionally, there are estimates that 10%-20% of the world’s total power will go to AI inference by the end of the decade unless new compute paradigms are created.”

Lightmatter, of course, intends to be one of those new paradigms. Its approach is, at least potentially, faster and more efficient, using arrays of microscopic optical waveguides to let the light essentially perform logic operations just by passing through them: a sort of analog-digital hybrid. Since the waveguides are passive, the main power draw is creating the light itself, then reading and handling the output.

One really interesting aspect of this form of optical computing is that you can increase the power of the chip just by using more than one color at once. Blue does one operation while red does another — though in practice it’s more like 800 nanometers wavelength does one, 820 does another. It’s not trivial to do so, of course, but these “virtual chips” can vastly increase the amount of computation done on the array. Twice the colors, twice the power.

8. China AI startup MiniMax raising over $250 million from Tencent-backed entity, others

BEIJING/HONG KONG, June 1 (Reuters) — Chinese startup MiniMax, working on AI solutions similar to that of Microsoft-backed OpenAI’s ChatGPT, is close to completing a fundraising of more than $250 million that will value it at about $1.2 billion, people familiar with the matter said.

The deal comes amid a global AI buzz kicked off by ChatGPT that has spread to China, shoring up stocks in artificial intelligence firms and prompting a flurry of domestic companies, such as Alibaba, Huawei (HWT.UL), and Baidu, to announce rival products.

MiniMax’s latest fundraising drew in new investors such as an entity linked to technology giant Tencent, two people said, on condition of anonymity as the information was not public.

MiniMax and Tencent did not respond to a Reuters request for comment.

MiniMax was founded in 2021 by some former employees of SenseTime (0020.HK), including Yan Junjie — a former vice president at the Chinese AI firm, two other people said.

9. Italy to launch €150M fund for AI startups

Italy is the latest country looking to quickly shore up domestic development of an AI ecosystem. As part of its Strategic Program for Artificial Intelligence, the government will “soon” launch a €150 million fund to support startups in the field, backed by development bank Cassa Depositi e Prestiti (CDP).

As reported by Corriere Communazione, Alessio Butti, Italy’s cabinet undersecretary in charge of technological innovation, relayed the news of the state-backed fund yesterday. While he didn’t provide specific details on the amount to be made available, government sources subsequently told Reuters the figure being discussed in Rome was in the vicinity of €150 million.

“Our goal is to increase the independence of Italian industry and cultivate our national capacity to develop skills and research in the sector,” Butti said. “This is why we are working with CDP on the creation of an investment fund for the most innovative startups, so that study, research, and programming on AI can be promoted in Italy.”

10. Warsaw-based ffVC announces €60 million fund for Series A and late Seed investments in Central European startups

ff Venture Capital (ffVC), a New York- and Warsaw-based international venture capital firm, has launched ff Red & White, a new €60 million fund to support startups in Central Europe. The fund will focus on Series A and late seed investments in startups tackling the most pressing challenges facing enterprises and society, in areas such as enterprise software, industrial tech, and sustainability transformation.

Partnering with JBIC IG Partners, a Japanese investment advisory firm, the fund has already secured the majority of its targeted capital from investors, including several Japanese multinational corporations and the Japan Bank for International Cooperation (JBIC), Japan’s policy-based financial institution. ff Red & White is a global joint venture with JBIC IG Partners.

Maciej Skarul, partner at ffVC, says: “This fund will open up a previously unexplored market for Central European startups, and grants Japanese corporations access to cutting-edge European frontier enterprise technologies. We believe there is a unique opportunity for startups aggressively tackling pressing challenges in both regions — ageing populations, changes in global trade and its impact on manufacturing economies, as well as energy dependence.”

The focus on solutions for enterprises is motivated by the complexity of global challenges contemporary businesses face. These require startups to reach for an even higher level of innovation in areas including supply chain management, energy shortages, inflation control, and reducing carbon emissions to meet climate crisis targets. Central European startups are in a unique position to leverage the expertise and skill set necessary to excel in these technologies, but they often lag behind their global peers in terms of access to capital and international exposure.

In addition to filling this gap and providing capital to entrepreneurs with the ambition to go big globally, ffVC’s latest fund is creating a bridge between Central European startups and the major global markets. Alongside ffVC’s well-established US networks, the new fund’s corporate Japanese investors provide access to collaborative opportunities with Japan-headquartered global corporations, allowing them to commercialise their industrial enterprise solutions anywhere in the world.

Mariusz Adamski, partner at ffVC, says: “With Japan, our strategic presence now extends to the world’s three largest economies, barring China. That reach means we can source better deals, our portfolio companies can grow faster and we are able to create more exit options. This setup allows us to provide Central European pre-Series B startups with unparalleled global opportunities.”

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