Gaurav Singh

The Canadian startup scene is dead According to all metrics the startup ecosystem has been declared at “rock bottom” due to lackluster amount of investments in comparison to post COVID boom How does Canada plan on fixing this? - Incentivizing tech talent from big tech layoffs - encouraging tech talent through more accelerators - increasing access to grants #canada #vc #investing #startupstech #tech #venturecapital

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I’m thrilled to be announcing that Notion Capital is leading the $15m Series A investment in Cogna today. In the industry, we like to think that software has been eating the world. But when you look at the data a better description would be more of a nibble. Depending on what source you look at the software industry represents between 5-8% of global GDP. Contrast that with the services industry that represents between 60-70% of GDP and worth around $25 trillion on a global basis. Most services have been out of reach for the software industry. They have either been too complex or too specialized for off the shelf software to access in any economically viable way. But that’s beginnning to change with GenAI leading to the emergence of ‘service as a software.’ Cogna is at the forefront of this opportunity - building precision software at scale and delivering huge productivity gains for traditional industries. We know Ben Peters & Lars Mennen well having backed their previous company Five AI that was acquired by Bosch in 2022. And we’re very excited to be backing them again together with Hoxton Ventures & Chalfen Ventures Read my full blog post on why we invested here. Radu Bozga Ben Peters Lars Mennen Bryan Gartner Mike Chalfen Hussein Kanji Kirsten Connell https://lnkd.in/eh8mhcJb

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Check out our curated list of #SanFrancisco startups, complete with funding details and key insights. https://lnkd.in/drQWSuqx #startup #startups #venturecapital #funding #vc #investmentbanking

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Spent a wonderful week in Canada with family! Now back to business.. Here's your weekly AI update: 🔙 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐁𝐚𝐜𝐤𝐰𝐚𝐫𝐝 𝐏𝐚𝐬𝐬: 𝐑𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐬𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐓𝐡𝐫𝐨𝐮𝐠𝐡 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐀𝐈 𝐖𝐞𝐞𝐤 Week 51 | August 5 - August 11 The OpenAI Brain Drain Industry: 🚨OpenAI co-founder John Schulman leaves for Anthropic; President Greg Brockman is taking extended leave through the end of year. What's interesting is that three of their most technical co-founders (Ilya Sutskever, John Schulman, Andrej Karpathy) have all left the company now. This then begs the question - is this a result of natural silicon-valley attrition, or is there something deeper going on here? And moreover, how will this impact the technical moat that OpenAI has built over the years? (https://lnkd.in/gztRKhwV) 🚨Google announced that new Gemini AI-powered features will be incorporated in a variety of home devices, such as Google Home and Nest (https://lnkd.in/gV2QacAQ?). It also announced a significant reduction in token cost of Gemini 1.5 Flash (https://lnkd.in/gbNe6yNU?) 🚨Figure releases Figure 02, it's newest humanoid robot. Figure has been actively testing robots with BMW at a manufacturing plant. Figure last raised $675M Series B in February 2024, valuing the company at $2.6 billion. (https://lnkd.in/gZnPSke4) 🚨Mark Zuckerberg said on Meta's Q2 earning call that to train Llama 4, the company will need 10x more compute than what was needed to train Llama 3. (https://lnkd.in/g5pEPrTw?) 🚨Elon Musk filed a lawsuit against Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, renewing claims that the company is betraying its founding aims of benefiting the public good rather than pursuing profits. (https://lnkd.in/gAk5grU6) Financing and M&A: 🚨Groq raises $640m in Series D at a $2.8B valuation. The round was led by Blackrock Private Equity Partners with participation from other investors such as Neuberger Berman, Type One Ventures, Cisco, KDDI, and Samsung Catalyst Fund. (https://lnkd.in/gRtKQKvW?) 🚨Hugging Face acquires Seattle data storage startup Xethub. The HF team plans to integrate Xethub's backend storage technology, enabling developers to host more large models and datasets than currently possible. CEO Clem Delangue 🤗 confirmed this was the largest acquisition the company has made thus far. (https://lnkd.in/g8fJ-BjT) 🚨OpenAI is leading a $60m Series B funding round for Opal Camera, a maker of professional-grade webcams(https://lnkd.in/gMT9dkTG) 🚨ProRata.ai a company that has invented an attribution technology to properly compensate content owners, has raised a $25m Series A, led by Prime Movers Lab, Mayfield Fund and Revolution Ventures. (https://lnkd.in/gumjbWmj) R&D: 🚨Alibaba Group releases Qwen2-math, a SOTA model for math-specific tasks. (https://lnkd.in/g8Jh3M7T?) Other Interesting Resources: 🚨 Between May and August, more Humane AI Pins were returned than purchased (https://lnkd.in/gy56qpKm?). 😯

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So great to speak to Mohammed Islam on The Mo Show podcast last week! Watch the full episode here!

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What’s the next frontier in enterprise sales optimization? This week Mada Seghete and I dig deep on her immigrant founder journey, the hurdles to turning Branch into a unicorn and frontier AI models for enterprises sales attribution. https://lnkd.in/dnPACCJ4

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Kanabo’s Remarkable Rise to the London Public Market What does it take to navigate a public listing during a global pandemic? In this episode, we relive the excitement of Kanabo’s listing day as Avihu Tamir shares the behind-the-scenes journey—from the initial approval to the unique challenges of raising funds during COVID-19. Pivoting to virtual fundraising via Zoom in late 2020 was unheard of, yet it became a game-changer. Discover how Avihu Tamir and the team turned these unprecedented obstacles into opportunities, ultimately raising over £12 million—far exceeding their initial target of £3 million. This milestone is a testament to their adaptability, resilience, and the unwavering confidence investors have in Kanabo’s vision. 📅 If you’re an entrepreneur looking to navigate similar challenges or scale your business, let’s connect 👇 https://lnkd.in/e8Wf2TTa #Entrepreneurship #Innovation #EconomicRecovery #Resilience #Kanabo #GlobalMarkets #IPO #BusinessGrowth

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My latest investment is rooted in a profoundly unique insight in one of the world largest industries, and I could not be more excited about it. Meet Kashmir Intelligence. We’re leading a $5M round alongside our friends at Jigsaw VC, Tiny Supercomputer Investment Company, Material Ventures, firedrop and TrueSight Ventures. The ideal Stride.VC deal requires (a) a unique insight in (b) a fundamentally interesting market with (c) a scalable business model and (d) a team of founders who can reshape their industry and (e) intentionality. This opportunity delivers on of all of these. The downstream oil industry is what our world runs on. Optimising the performance and output of existing infrastructure is one of the most immediately impactful things we can do to address the climate crisis. Additionally, delivering effective infrastructure in the face of the Russia crisis is a geopolitical imperative of profound importance. Oil refineries have a major data problem - they run millions of miles of pipes generating terabytes of sensor data they cannot move to the cloud, and their inability to harness this intelligence is hurting their efficiency. Enter Orbital - an edge infrastructure AI layer that delivers cloud-beating deep learning capabilities into downstream environments at a fraction of the cost, with none of the security risks. Founder Samyakh (Sam) Tukra stumbled upon this issue whilst building digital twins for refineries and immediately realised he'd come across a strategic issue plaguing heavy industrial environments in general and the oil industry in particular. Refineries are completely unique beasts with complex optimisation requirements in data-constrained, high security environments. Hence the solution here would require a complete different approach to deliver the predictive optimisation results that these companies need. Figuring out how to address this multi-faceted issue delivered the unique insight on which this company was born. Sam partnered up with repeat founder Callum Adamson and together they kickstarted Kashmir. Quite the duo. Callum and I share a habit of meditating on our own death and Sam is both charming and so talented I'm not even sure he's really human; the chemistry between all of us was excellent from the word "go". The company is emerging from stealth with real world performance underway at ExxonMobil / Gruppo API and ABB/ICL facilities and are excited to formally launch Orbital at Global Refining & Petrochemicals Congress 2024 in Delhi on the 27th of June as part of their Indian market focus. I'm excited to be part of this important company's journey as we strive to make industry more efficient. Big Data needs a sharp Edge, and we’re looking forward to showing you what Orbital can do. Thank you Pietro Invernizzi for the intro and assist! Onward. https://lnkd.in/eWJmft2w

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Below is a good summary and context for the Q3 quarterly report released by the CVCA. On the surface, it seems like it was a good quarter for venture investment in Canadá. But a quick look under the surface paints a potentially very different picture: - the 130 deals closed in Q3 matches the lows during COVID in 2020 - the $2,651MM in deal value appears fairly robust other than the heady days of 2021. But it includes both the Clio deal of $1,240MM and the Cohere deal of $616MM leaving the remaining 128 deals totalling $795MM, matching the levels last seen during COVID in 2020 - the vast majority of the source of the capital invested in Q3 are from US or other foreign sources of capital - early stage investments continue their trend of performing poorly this year What does this all mean? Not really sure yet. It certainly was not a good quarter of activity but it’s too early to call this a trend. But is it a leading indicator that deal activity will continue to be constrained? Is there evidence of a lack of Canadian source capital required to invest in startups, and in particular, early stage opportunities. When the Federal government decided to increase capital gains taxes, many people in the innovation community sounded the alarm bells. The fear was that such an increase will further take the air out of the sails of funding startups in Canadá. While it is still too early to conclude the impact of such a move, it is clear the timing of this decision is very unfortunate because there is a clear trend that the activity in venture from Canadian sources of capital is slowing down materially.

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Weekly Recap 1. Recorded an episode with Arun Antony of YE Stack - They have a very interesting hypothesis 2. Talked with Arav Behl building BuilderCast podcast 3. Talked with Adil building WeCrack Cohort 4. Preparing for a big episode today Ft. Co Founder of Blume Ventures 5. Received a really kind message from an upcoming guest 6. Received an encouraging message from Amrit Sheneva building Flashmates, Hiremart, and more Next week is going to be an interesting one

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Don’t miss out on this Fireside Chat with Ankur Nagpal: Scaling Success! 🚀 Join us on November 8th at AcceleratorCON for an exclusive conversation with Ankur Nagpal, founder of Teachable (scaled to $60M+ ARR, acquired for $250M) and Carry. Ankur will share valuable insights on building and scaling startups, drawing from his own journey in tech entrepreneurship and his experience investing in 100+ startups with Vibe Capital. This session is packed with lessons that every founder and startup enthusiast can benefit from. Save the date—this is one you won’t want to miss! #acceleratorCON #Networking #Entrepreneurship #Investors #Startups #BusinessConnections #BrooklynNavyYard

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An interview process, by definition, can only cover so much content in a given time period. But decision-making is a topic that, when prioritized, can increase executive job satisfaction down the line. When we compare survey respondents who did have an interview conversation about decision making versus those who did not, we find that those who did are 1.4x more satisfied with their jobs overall. Kingsley Gate sheds light on this often-overlooked skill for HBR.

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Journey of finding an Idea with Kaushik Srinivasan and FiddleCube (YC W23) Often people wait for an idea to strike to begin their startup journey. However, most likely your first idea will not work out, at least not in the way you imagined it to be. Lesson #1: Don’t Automate Fun Part of the work. Kaushik and Neha Nupoor started FiddleCube to work on zero knowledge proofs, but after talking to more than 300 Developers they realised that it's really interesting for Developers to work on that in-house and not outsource, it’s the fun part of work. Lesson #2: Take long term view and work on core interests. Then they started looking at things they have worked on in the past like Fintech, Customer Support etc. thinking this will provide them with an edge. But soon realised that the startup journey is like a 5-10 year journey. It's important to work on something you’re excited about to prevent burning out or falling out of love with an idea. Being Technical Founders they are excited about tooling for Data scientists, Developers, Infra. This helped them streamline their efforts. Lesson #3: Focus gives Depth. Focussing on Data scientists and their problems allowed them to research on the most critical problem in Machine learning - high quality data. They realised the LLMs are a major jump in data generation compared to previous state of the art GAN based solutions. This new jump in technology will help them bring custom data generation capability to long tail of new startups and companies building in AI space. #startups #buildinpublic #pivot

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Looking forward to diving into the state of the late-stage venture market at TechCrunch Disrupt next week with Karthik Subramanian. With late-stage companies facing tougher paths to exit, we’ll be debating whether the market is actually rebounding, sharing our thoughts on the outlook for future IPOs, and discussing how founders can navigate these shifting dynamics. Hope to see you there! #TCDisrupt #VC

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What's better: (a) Budget 100% revenue growth and come in at 80% (b) Budget 50% revenue growth and come in at 70% IMO, option b is much better for two reasons: (1) Option a will have an unexpectedly high burn. (2) Option b sets a culture of outperformance. Some thoughts: This is very frequently the case - companies that miss their revenue budget don't miss their opex budget. Meaning, they spend in line with plan but generate less revenue and less gross margin than plan which translates to an unexpectedly high burn. This normalizes inefficient spending which is a problem that compounds. Depending on the capitalization of the company, an unexpectedly high burn rate can also create all sorts of problems related to the liquidity of the company with consequences ranging from moderate to devastating. The flipside is also true. Usually when companies beat their revenue budget, they still spend within their opex plan which leads to a lower than expected burn rate (or higher than expected profitability). This means the company ends the period with a stronger than expected cash position while still posting strong growth. It also reinforces the expectation of efficiency and operating leverage across the organization. Furthermore, consistently beating your budget sets a culture of outperformance which begets further outperformance. On the flipside, consistently missing your budget sets a culture of underperformance such that often times the budget loses meaning within the business because no one expects to hit it. When the budget loses meaning, efficiency, ROI, KPIs, etc. lose meaning and companies can become rudderless. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, my best companies consistently met or beat budget. And of course, my most challenged companies almost never met budget. It's much better to walk in the path of the winners.

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I recently had the pleasure of working with Sanchit, founder of Zime.ai (portfolio of z21 Ventures), on refining their OKRs, core value metrics, and growth model. Sanchit was looking to streamline their quarterly goals and align everyone around a simple, clear direction. 🔄 As an early-stage founder, Sanchit was juggling various goals—ARR, PMF, and more. 🎯 We spent a few hours together, distilling the core value propositions and marrying the high-level financial metrics into low-level operational and core value metrics. 📊 The outcome was a clear north star 🌟 further broken down into input sub-metrics that are easy to measure and communicate across the team. Even better, the relationship between these metrics aligns with the organization structure of Zime, helping clearly define ownership of all these metrics within teams. 🛠️ It’s always rewarding to see the clarity and confidence that comes from simplifying processes. ✅ Here’s what Sanchit shared: "As an early stage founder, I was trying to divide our quarterly goals into various functions. There are goals related to ARR, PMF, etc. I was wondering how to simplify them and align the team on a simple north star. Sudarshan was kind enough to jam and help us align our PMF to ARR (albeit new ARR + NRR) and break it down to lead metrics that can be simply measured. There was no framework, no jargon - his advice was contextual to us. We later finished quarterly, and the team liked the clarity and simplicity of the exercise.” Thank you for the sweet quote, Sanchit! 😃 It’s always sweet when founders such as Sanchit reach out 🤝 to brainstorm and even sweeter when they write back with a thank you note. 😊 As an investor, I’ve always taken pride in being available for founders when they need me. (I guess being an ex-founder makes me empathize more.) 😅 Proud to know that Sanchit built further to refine the work and roll out OKRs for team Zime! 🚀 #Founders #OKRs #Growth #EarlyStage Raj Shekhar Singh Jyotika Gupta Shivam Bhotika Ankit Anand Akela Shachi Shah

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In the second quarter of 2024, global startup funding saw a significant increase to $79 billion, marking a 16% rise from the previous quarter and a 12% increase compared to Q2 2023. AI sector funding notably doubled to $24 billion, comprising 30% of total investments, the highest quarterly amount in recent years. The quarter also witnessed heightened M&A activity, particularly in large deals, which injected liquidity into the venture capital market. Read More Here: https://lnkd.in/e-JYcy2g Crunchbase News Today Gené Teare #venturecapital #investments #AI Branded Hospitality Ventures Hospitality Headline Newsletter #MandA ChatGPT OpenAI Kunal Gandhi Jason Kwon Jonathan Lachman Varun Shetty Tadao Nagasaki Sterling Douglass Brizo FoodMetrics

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Thrilled to share that I have been shortlisted for the The VC Fellowship! This opportunity aligns perfectly with my passion for innovation and supporting visionary entrepreneurs. Excited to contribute to the startup ecosystem and learn from the best in venture capital. #VCFellowship #Entrepreneurship #Innovation #PassionForGrowth 🚀

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