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39-Year-Old Black Mom
Inventors

Meet the 39-Year-Old Black Mom Investor Who Flips Mobile Homes.

by Alex Turner
written by Alex Turner

She introduced Nichole Briscoe, a 39-year-old African American mother and social worker from Burlington, North Carolina. She created her side business of converting mobile homes, increasing her monthly income from $3,000 to $7,000.

Nichole, who resides with her spouse and children, told Business Insider that her original plan was to invest in real estate to supplement the family’s income. However, she found a market niche for mobile houses due to the high cost of single-family homes. There is a need for these reasonably priced prefabricated buildings, which are frequently used as permanent homes, particularly for people who cannot afford regular homes.
Motivated to explore the real estate industry, Nichole enrolled in a $500 course on investing in mobile homes, which allowed her to join this sector. After obtaining a $20,000 loan for house renovations, she spent less than $10,000 renovating mobile homes in North Carolina. Her investment is nearly doubled or tripled when she sells these residences after incurring remodeling fees ranging from $3,000 to $15,000.

Briscoe’s flips, usually 900 square feet, have two bathrooms and three bedrooms, and they draw purchasers even without any advertising. Word-of-mouth marketing and social media sites like Facebook and Instagram have generated enough interest. There is such a high demand for inexpensive housing that she even has a waiting list for her homes.

She provides a “rent-to-own” option, further increasing property accessibility. Over three to five years, buyers can choose how much they want to pay each month in payments of $600 to $900 until they reach the transaction price.

Nichole uses a different tactic than flipping: she contracts with a seller at a lower price and locates a buyer ready to pay a higher price without incurring remodeling expenditures. This is known as wholesaling. Thanks to this strategy, she has made almost $45,000 from the wholesale sale of 13 mobile homes.

Additionally, using the handle “The Mobile Home Mami” on Instagram, she has over 93,000 followers and has formed an LLC named Eliam Properties. Despite her success, Nichole intends to keep juggling her real estate company and social work, with the possibility of going full-time in the future.

“I do really love my job working with students,” she stated. “In the future, I definitely see potential in this becoming full time but not right now.”

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Image Credits: Nathan Laine / Bloomberg / Getty Images
STARTUPS

Mistral AI, a Paris-based OpenAI rival, closed its $415 million funding round.

by Editorial.admin
written by Editorial.admin

Mistral AI, a French startup, has completed its Series A investment round, which investors eagerly anticipated. According to Bloomberg, the firm has raised €385 million, equivalent to $415 million at the current exchange rate. The company is estimated to be worth around $2 billion. Today marks the beginning of Mistral AI’s commercial platform availability as well.

Mistral AI raised a seed round of $112 million less than six months ago to establish a European competitor to OpenAI. Mistral AI, co-founded by former employees of Google’s DeepMind and Meta, is now working on fundamental models with an open technology perspective.

Lightspeed Venture Partners has also invested in the artificial intelligence startup, and Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) is the leader of the most recent fundraising round. A lengthy list of investors, including Salesforce, BNP Paribas, CMA-CGM, General Catalyst, Elad Gil, and Conviction, are also investing in the round. This is not the end of the story.

Arthur Mensch, co-founder and CEO of Mistral AI, said in a statement that the company has been working toward a specific goal since it was established in May. “We have been pursuing a clear trajectory: that of creating a European champion with a global vocation in generative artificial intelligence, based on an open, responsible, and decentralized approach to technology,” Mensch said.

The Mistral 7B was the first model that Mistral AI released, and it was released in September. Because it was trained on a “small” dataset of around 7 billion tokens as parameters, this huge language model is not intended to compete directly with GPT-4 or Claude 2.

The business decided to make the Mistral 7B model accessible as a free download rather than giving access to it through application programming interfaces (APIs). This allowed developers to run the model on their own devices and servers.

Except for credit, the model was made available to the public under the Apache 2.0 license, an open-source license that does not limit its use or replication. Even though anybody may execute the model, it was constructed secretly using a confidential dataset not revealed before its creation.

Mistral AI also significantly influenced the discussions surrounding the European Union’s Artificial Intelligence Act. Specifically, the French artificial intelligence firm has advocated for a complete exemption for fundamental models. They have stated that legislation must be applied to use cases and businesses working on products that end customers directly utilize.

A few days ago, MPs from the European Union reached a political agreement. Specific transparency requirements will be imposed on businesses working on fundamental models. These businesses will be required to publish technical documents and summaries of the information included in the datasets.

Currently, an application programming interface (API) is the only way to access Mistral AI’s most advanced model.
Despite this, the firm intends to continue to generate revenue from its basic models. A beta version of Mistral AI’s developer platform is being made available today for this reason. This platform will allow other businesses to pay to access Mistral AI’s models using application programming interfaces (APIs).

In addition to the Mistral 7B model, also known as the “Mistral-tiny” model, developers will have access to the new Mixtral 8x7B model, also known as the “Mistral-small” model. When processing input tokens and selecting the most appropriate combination of parameters to provide an answer, this model employs what is known as “a router network.”

Because the model only employs a small portion of the complete set of parameters for each token, this method allows for an increase in the number of parameters a model may have while simultaneously regulating cost and latency. More specifically, Mixtral contains 45 billion parameters in total, but it only utilizes 12 billion parameters for each token. The company claimed in a blog post that, as a result, “it processes input and generates output at the same speed and for the same cost as a 12B model.”

Additionally, Mixtral 8x7B has been made available for free download and was distributed under the Apache 2.0 license when published. The Mistral-medium model is the third one found on the development platform Mistral provides. Although it is only accessible through the premium API platform, it is said to have superior performance compared to Mistral AI’s other models. Unfortunately, there is no download link provided.

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Lupita Nyong'o attends a premiere for the film "The Color Purple" in Los Angeles, California, U.S., December 6, 2023. REUTERS/Mario Anzuoni/File Photo
ARTS

The Berlin Film Festival picks Lupita Nyong’o to lead the 2024 jury.

by Lily Chen
written by Lily Chen

The organizers of the Berlin Film Festival revealed that Lupita Nyong’o, an actress who has won an Academy Award and is most recognized for her roles in “Black Panther” and “12 Years a Slave,” will serve as the head of the jury for the festival in the next year.

It was her Oscar-winning portrayal as the brutalized slave Patsy in Steve McQueen’s historical film “12 Years a Slave” that brought the Mexican-Kenyan actress to recognition. She frequently chooses parts that investigate the African diaspora and themes of race.

More recently, she played the role of Nakia, the female lead, in Marvel Studios’ first black-led superhero picture, “Black Panther” (2018), as well as in the sequel to the film, which is scheduled to be released in 2022. She also had a part in Jordan Peele’s psychological horror movie “Us” in 2019.

In addition, Nyong’o has theatrical and television appearances to her name. She is now working on a series that will be based on the novel “Americanah,” written by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, who is from Nigeria.

The Golden and Silver Bears, together with the prizes awarded at Cannes and Venice, are among the most coveted accolades on the international film festival circuit. The Berlinale, the yearly film festival that takes place in Germany’s financial center, selects the winners of the Golden and Silver Bears.

“Lupita Nyong’o embodies what we like in cinema: versatility in embracing different projects, addressing different audiences, and consistency to one idea,” Mariette Rissenbeek and Carlo Chatrian, directors of the Berlinale, stated in a statement as they referred to Lupita Nyong’o.

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STARTUPS

Carbon Maps, an environmental accounting startup for the food industry, gets new backers.

by Alex Turner
written by Alex Turner

Compared to other companies in the carbon and environmental accounting markets, Carbon Maps is a relatively new entrant because it has been around for less than a year. Despite this, the French firm has already obtained finance for $7.6 million (€7 million) due to the extension of the seed round by €3 million given to the startup.

Because I have already discussed carbon maps in February, I strongly suggest you read this earlier essay to obtain the complete picture. On the other hand, I felt it necessary to provide an update because the firm successfully persuaded Daphni to participate in the seed round. Breega and Samaipata have already contributed four million euros, equivalent to four and a half million dollars at the current exchange rate.

To refresh your memory, Carbon Maps is now in the process of developing a software-as-a-service platform that is centered on the environmental effects of the food business. Carbon Maps, in contrast to other carbon accounting startups, concentrates on a specific industry to assist businesses in calculating their environmental impact at the product level.

To lessen our influence on the environment, we first need to quantify and monitor it precisely. Stanislas Lot, a partner at Daphni, stated in a statement that “we are convinced that only a pure player like Carbon Maps has the capacity to do this at a sufficiently granular level to enable monitoring and improvement over time to take place.”

An example would be a firm that sells chicken breasts and uses carbon maps to evaluate these chicken breasts’ life cycles. This assessment would consider various factors, including the amount of energy necessary, the suppliers (grains), the packaging, the transportation, the waste, and some other factors.

Using the most recent recommendations from standardized sources such as the GHG Protocol, the IPCC, ISO 14040, and ISO 14044, Carbon Maps adheres to these guidelines. It considers carbon emissions that fall within scopes 1, 2, and 3, which means that you can incorporate indirect carbon emissions from clients and suppliers.

Through the platform, customers can obtain an eco-score and establish goals to reduce their influence on the environment over time. Additionally, it is an effective method for evaluating several suppliers and optimizing the supply chain depending on the carbon footprint of each source.

The ratings are not something that we wish to develop. We want to build the tools that assist with calculations— kind of SAP,” Patrick Asdaghi, co-founder and CEO of Carbon Maps, told me a few months ago. “We want to create the tools that help with calculations.”

Carbon Maps has already successfully persuaded a dozen businesses to utilize its platform. These clients include Andros, Sodexo, Potel & Chabot, the Bel milk producers’ organization, and Foodles.

Because French regulations are undergoing a transformation and the official introduction of the eco-score grading system is just around the corner, it is quite probable that we will hear more from Carbon Maps in the coming months. A virtuous loop might be created if food companies could compute and add a letter rating to their packaging, ranging from A to E. This resembles how the nutrient score is shown everywhere in French supermarkets.

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Image Credits: Fantuan
STARTUPS

Vancouver’s Fantuan raises $40M to deliver real Chinese food to your doorstep.

by Alex Turner
written by Alex Turner

When people leave China and relocate to other countries, they miss the ease of having applications that transport meals to them. For the past nine years, Fantuan, a startup located in Vancouver, has been working toward bringing the experience of Chinese meal delivery platforms to Western countries. Just recently, it successfully raised some more funds to make more significant progress toward its aim of offering authentic Chinese cuisine to people all over the world.

The venture capital firm Celtic House Asia, which invests in first-generation immigrants, and GrubMarket, a startup food supply chain with a valuation of over $1 billion in 2021, were responsible for raising $40 million for Fantuan, which translates to “rice balls” in Chinese.

Vision Plus, a venture capital business established by Eddie Wu, who was recently named as the chief executive officer of Alibaba, and JSD Capital, a boutique private equity firm, are two other investors participating in this initiative. Following the completion of the fundraising, the firm chose not to publish its valuation.

Besides institutional investors, Fantuan also received funding from several influential powerbrokers in China’s retail technology sector. These powerbrokers include the co-founders of Ele. I am a pioneer in the field of food delivery. Alibaba acquired me in 2018. Bianlifeng, a chain of unmanned convenience stores; Qunar, a GGV-backed travel booking website that larger rival Ctrip purchased; and Dianping, a more capable Chinese version of Yelp that Meituan, a significant player in the food delivery sector, owns.

Randy Wu founded Fantuan in 2014 while attending Simon Fraser University to study economics. He was inspired to create Fantuan by the rapidly growing popularity of meal delivery applications, specifically in China. Before dropping out of college to work full-time on what he considered his shot at “copy from China,” Wu ran the firm himself and wore numerous hats initially. One of these hats was physically carrying meals around the city of Vancouver. Notably, Meituan served as his standard of measurement.

Yaofei Feng, his co-founder, whom he had met online while playing Dota 2, joined Wu almost immediately. Feng bravely decided to leave his position as a software engineer at Amazon in Seattle and move to Vancouver due to Wu’s business venture.

As a result of the migration of millions of Chinese people to Western nations, the company’s founders were counting on the rising demand for high-quality Chinese cuisine in Western countries. As of 2020, there were approximately 10 million migrants of Chinese descent from other nations, according to research by the International Organization for Migration (IOM).

“Food from home is a kind of spiritual refuge when you are living abroad,” said Wu in an interview with TechCrunch. These words were taken from Wu’s statement. Even though Chinese cuisine was complicated in Saskatchewan, I still vividly recall the first Chinese supper I enjoyed three months after arriving there.

There is more to Fantuan’s aim than just delivery. Taking a page out of Meituan’s playbook, an all-in-one platform for local services in China, the company’s ultimate goal is to become the destination for Chinese people outside China to find and enjoy various leisure activities.

Additionally, its partnership with GrubMarket is reminiscent of Meituan’s vertical growth, in which the food delivery network connects restaurants with producers of ingredients supplying those eateries. By facilitating connections between farmers and clients such as Whole Foods and Costco, GrubMarket may use Fantuan to expand its reach to include mom-and-pop eateries in the future.

In just two years after its inception, Fantuan has established itself as the leading platform for the delivery of Chinese cuisine in Vancouver and has reached net profitability. It continued to be lucrative for another five years until the COVID-19 epidemic was in full swing, at which point it began aggressively expanding into the United States. This year, its yearly income is anticipated to be close to one hundred million dollars.

Delivering Chinese cuisine promptly might be challenging. The process of cooking can take a considerable amount of time. In contrast to platforms that are not exclusive to any one cuisine, those that concentrate on a single category have a smaller density of restaurants, which results in a longer delivery time. On the other hand, Wu said that Fantuan was able to attain an average delivery time of forty minutes across several cities, including Vancouver, Toronto, London, San Francisco, and Sydney.

There is a correlation between the availability of drivers and the delivery time. As a result of Fantuan’s preference for Chinese-speaking drivers who can converse with immigrant restaurant owners, recruitment attempts may not be successful in densely populated and costly cities like San Francisco. According to Wu, drivers are driven to Fantuan because the average order value from Chinese restaurants is almost “double” compared to that of significant food delivery platforms. This means that drivers receive more tips during their deliveries.

According to Wu, Fantuan’s customer retention rate is about 90 percent after five orders in twenty-four months. Active users make up about 1.2 million of the two million accounts that have been registered with the platform.

Wu thinks that Fantuan’s capacity to bring on board a wide variety of genuine Chinese restaurants is one of the principal advantages of the company. The platform uses the on-the-ground sales formula that Chinese technology companies frequently use to digitize traditional retail. This recipe entails physically visiting clients and creating connections during face-to-face interactions.

“Our business development specialists would each manage approximately 80 restaurants and conduct frequent visits to these customers, teaching them tips such as how to do marketing and how to pack more efficiently for delivery,” said Wu. “They would also pay frequent visits to these customers.”

As of right now, Fantuan has over 500 employees located all over the world. At the beginning of this year, Yinfeng Lu, who had previously worked as a sales executive at Meituan, became the chief operating officer.

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Image Credits: Jason marz / Getty Images
STARTUPS

EnCharge raised $22.6M to commercialize its AI-accelerating chips.

by Alex Turner
written by Alex Turner

TechCrunch published an article on a relatively unknown startup responsible for developing artificial intelligence (AI)-accelerated chips. These chips were designed to compete with hardware manufactured by industry giants like Nvidia, AMD, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon Web Services, and Intel. Its objective at the time seemed a bit audacious, and it still has that same air about it. However, to its credit, the startup company EnCharge AI is still doing well and has recently completed a fresh investment round that received a total of $22.6 million.

In addition to RTX Ventures, ACVC Partners, Anzu Partners, S5V, Alley Corp., Scout, and Silicon Catalyst Angels, the VentureTech Alliance, which is a strategic venture capital firm affiliated with the semiconductor superpower TSMC, took part in the round. As stated by Naveen Verma, co-founder and CEO of EnCharge, the additional cash will be used to expand the company’s team of fifty workers throughout the United States of America, Canada, and Germany. Additionally, the new funding will strengthen the development of EnCharge’s artificial intelligence chips and “full stack” AI solutions.

“The mission of EnCharge is to provide broader access to artificial intelligence for the 99% of organizations that cannot afford to deploy today’s expensive and energy-intensive AI chips,” Verma said. “EnCharge’s mission is to provide access to AI.” For example, to harness the full potential of artificial intelligence, we are enabling new use cases and forming factors that operate sustainably, both from an economic and an environmental point of view.

Alongside Echere Iroaga and Kailash Gopalakrishnan, Verma, the director of the Keller Center for Innovation in Engineering Education at Princeton University, created EnCharge the previous year. Up until very recently, Gopalakrishnan held the position of IBM fellow. The multinational technology corporation had employed him for over 18 years. Formerly serving as Vice President and subsequently General Manager, Iroaga was in charge of the connectivity business unit at the semiconductor manufacturer Macom.

Verma and his colleagues at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign also received government funds in 2017, which is where EnCharge started. Verma led an investigation into new forms of nonvolatile memory devices that cost $8.3 million. This endeavor was an extension of the Electronics Resurgence Initiative, a program run by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to advance a variety of computer chip technologies.

On the other hand, nonvolatile memory is said to be more energy efficient than the “volatile” memory that is often used in modern computers since it can store data even when it is not connected to a constant power source.

Additionally, DARPA provided funding for Verma’s research on in-memory computing. When we say “in-memory,” we are talking about the process of doing calculations in random-access memory (RAM) to eliminate the delay caused by storage devices.

To put Verma’s findings into practice, EnCharge was established. EnCharge’s technology, according to Verma, can reduce power consumption compared to computer processors while simultaneously accelerating artificial intelligence applications on servers and devices located at the “network edge.”

“The artificial intelligence compute of today is both expensive and power-intensive; at the moment, only the most well-capitalized organizations are innovating in the field of artificial intelligence.” In most cases, he stated that artificial intelligence is not yet feasible at scale in their enterprises or goods. By tackling the extremely high energy requirements and cost hurdles that enterprises are now encountering, EnCharge Technologies can supply the processing power that the market is seeking.

While it is true that EnCharge has not yet commenced mass production of its technology, it is also important to note that the company has just “several” clients lined up at this point. Another problem that EnCharge faces is competing against well-funded competitors in the artificial intelligence accelerator hardware industry, which is already considered saturated. Both Axelera and GigaSpaces are working on building in-memory hardware to speed up artificial intelligence workloads. NeuroBlade, on the other hand, has successfully obtained tens of millions of dollars in venture capital investment for their in-memory inference chip, designed for use in data centers and edge devices.

Because third parties have not yet had the opportunity to evaluate the performance of EnCharge’s chips, it isn’t easy to take the company’s performance claims at face value. However, EnCharge’s investors are ready to support them for what it’s worth.

Kai Tsang, a member of the VentureTech Alliance, stated in an email that “EnCharge is solving critical issues around computing power, accessibility, and costs that are both limiting AI today and inadequate for the management of AI tomorrow.” Using a technologically innovative architecture compatible with today’s chain, this has built computing that goes beyond the capabilities of the systems that are now in use.

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Startup SuccessesSTARTUPS

Founders of Black-Owned Watermelon Company in NYC Drive 16 Hours a Day to Get Fresh Produce

by Alex Turner
written by Alex Turner

Meet the founders of Black Seed Brothers, a well-known watermelon firm in New York City that deals in farm-fresh, delicious watermelons with black seeds. People who are of African descent own and run Black Seed Brothers. Furthermore, they provide fresh watermelon juice and smoothies, which are well-regarded by the community. To deliver freshly picked watermelons directly from fields in South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, they must drive for up to sixteen hours virtually every day. This is necessary for them to achieve their goal.

People from all over the New York City region come to purchase these brothers’ watermelons, which come in both red and yellow varieties. Some brothers are blood relatives, while others are just good friends. They bring in up to one thousand fresh melons weekly from farms in the south.
In contrast to the seedless version that is often accessible in stores, they sell watermelons that have black seeds that are dispersed throughout the delicious flesh. This kind has a superior texture and a more robust flavoring. Johann, one of the brothers, was quoted as saying, “Real black seeds from the dirt,” as The Curious Uptowner website reported.

“When you see the black seeds, you know they’re the original,” says Tyler, another crew member. “They are the original.”

Additionally, they have partnered with My Health Station to market fresh watermelon juices. This food truck company is of African descent and offers wholesome meals and snacks. In addition, they provide delivery services throughout the city through Uber Eats.

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STARTUPS

FrontEdge raises $10M in debt and equity from TLG and Flexport to facilitate trade for African exporters.

by Alex Turner
written by Alex Turner

A significant obstacle to the dynamic nature of African international commerce is that only thirty percent of trade volumes use banks as financial intermediaries. Because their larger competitors take up most of the available funding, small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs) suffer disproportionately from this stark funding gap.

The potential to transform commerce between Africa and other countries is evident when one considers the enormous yearly value of international trade volumes, which amount to $1.2 trillion. More critically, the necessity for entrepreneurs that can capitalize on this unexplored market is highlighted. To support the expansion of African cross-border commerce, FrontEdge, a fintech company located in Lagos, has secured $10 million in a loan and equity seed round, with the former providing more than 70% of the total.

FrontEdge, established in 2021 by Moni Alli, gives SMEs that export and import the working capital and IT solutions they need to make cross-border and international transactions easier. The former McKinsey consultant has spent the last ten years brainstorming ways to bridge the funding gap for African SMEs. She drew on her experience working on digital transformations for tier-one banks, especially in Nigeria, South Africa, and Morocco. The creator, who formerly had a private equity position at Development Partners International (DPI), tells TechCrunch in an interview that FrontEdge results from his expertise.

I believe the outcome of the extensive time I spent counseling banks on SME financing was that the balance sheet was mainly geared toward large corporations. After earning his MBA at Harvard Business School, Alli launched the firm. “The financing process in banks is outdated; you have collateral-based lending, which means underwriting a SME can be deemed unprofitable,” Alli stated.

Therefore, digitizing these procedures and customizing them for SMEs makes sense; this was the recommendation I made before, resulting in FrontEdge. We primarily concentrated on SME exporters from Africa. We observed a significant funding vacuum in that area of cross-border commerce and the potential to essentially guarantee transactions across national borders.

FrontEdge’s problem is seen in the pre-funding strategy of agri-commodity traders, for example. These dealers provide smallholder farmers with advances, managing the 60-day process from storage to delivery. After that, payment is not made until the products arrive at their destination, which might take 40 to 60 days, depending on the jurisdiction. For exporters, this causes a large financial tie-up over a 120–180-day period.

In contrast to banks, FrontEdge offers these exporters upfront funding based on transaction-based underwriting without requiring collateral. However, according to Alli, the timing of its interventions changes according to the risk it is willing to take. He claims that the startup usually works with goods that are actually on a vessel or occasionally at the warehouse, with average payment terms of 60 to 90 days. This enables fintech to bridge the working capital gap, which speeds up receivables and permits exporters to conduct more business.

Although FrontEdge started as a lending-only platform, it has since become more comprehensive. It is integrated with many databases to underwrite buyers’ offshore creditworthiness and offer insights into the dynamics of cross-border trade between buyers and sellers. The firm saw that these companies were getting dollar flows after completing many deals last year and saw an opportunity to solve issues with capital restrictions and excessive fees inside the banking sector. Because many of these exporters use naira as their native currency, fintech provided further help by making it easier to open up offshore accounts abroad and convert dollar revenues into that currency.

FrontEdge, which functions as a vertical bank (offering financing, cross-border payments, and offshore accounts) catering to African traders’ requirements, subsequently names companies like JP Morgan and Providus Bank as partners on its digital platform. It offers exporters technological solutions such as document management, shipping insurance, and logistical management to supplement its financial services. Freight forwarders like Jetstream and Send are among the company’s nearby rivals in Africa; others with comparable business plans, such as Mundi and Marco Financial, target external markets like Latin America.

It’s a volume game, and with the narrow margins, the goal is to basically execute as many deals as possible. According to the CEO, “What you see in Europe and other jurisdictions is that these traders are given this financial support, which means that they can be more competitive and give longer payment terms to their buyers offshore.”

Thus, we give African exporters the resources and equipment they need to compete with exporters from South America, Europe, or the United States. Price and product quality are the only factors for these significant purchasers. Thus, we can provide them with funding at conditions they can provide, allowing us to level the playing field with many of these purchasers worldwide.

FrontEdge says that since its introduction, its clients, SME exporters, have increased by 20% per month and have tripled their sales on the platform. The variety of transactions the organization funds generates its income. Alli reiterates that FrontEdge prioritizes preventing losses and proving successful repayments, but she withholds information on the company’s revenue growth. FrontEdge says that after completing more than 50 contracts, each including several transactions and invoices, it has so far recorded a 0% default rate.

In order to diversify its revenue streams beyond financing, FrontEdge intends to hire more personnel, expand its financing product throughout Nigeria, Ghana, Ivory Coast, and Kenya, and introduce new products with the help of its capital from lead investor TLG Capital and other backers, including digital freight forwarder Flexport. “TLG is pleased to assist FrontEdge in its endeavors to foster the growth of African SMEs, acting as a vital link to grant financial empowerment and capital access to African exporters. We think the government will carry out the plan, and FrontEdge is ideally positioned to address a critical issue that has to be resolved for African traders to participate in international commerce,” stated Johnnie Puxley, an investment specialist at TLG Capital.

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STARTUPS

LucidLink lands $75M for its on-demand file streaming tech.

by Alex Turner
written by Alex Turner

Today, LucidLink, a company that offers a platform for team collaboration on files without downloading or syncing them, announced that it had raised $75 million in a Series C round with participation from Brighton Park Capital, Headline, Adobe Ventures, and Baseline Ventures. With this tranche, LucidLink has raised $90 million in total, a significant amount considering the company was only established about seven years ago.

Like this writer, you may wonder how a storage startup raised about $100 million and for what purpose. Perhaps the five-fold increase in yearly recurring revenue over the previous two years is related. Regarding the funds’ intended use, CEO and co-founder Peter Thompson of LucidLink informed TechCrunch via email that the company will “accelerate” its efforts in customer acquisition, vertical expansion, and product and engineering development.

Because of our best-in-class KPIs and metrics for software-as-a-service businesses, he said investors came to LucidLink seeking investment rather than the company needing to solicit money. “The notable increase in valuation over our Series B in 2022 is a testament to our strong performance, despite the market conditions, in a sea of flat and down rounds.” (Unfortunately, Thompson declined to reveal the precise valuation.)

In 2016, Thompson co-founded LucidLink with George Dochev, whom he had met while working for Florida-based software-defined storage vendor DataCore Software. Dochev was a vital member of the engineering team at DataCore and frequently faced difficulties accessing files spread across multiple physical locations. He developed a remedy and worked with Thompson to try and market the technology.

“By providing instant access to large files and safe real-time collaboration, LucidLink is designed to help remote and hybrid teams of creative professionals tackle a variety of complex use cases,” Thompson stated. “LucidLink has achieved success in media and entertainment, gaming, architecture, design, advertising, and marketing, and has broad applications across creative industries where collaborating on massive files is an issue.”

With LucidLink, users may utilize files and folders when a teammate saves or updates them in a shared file space. This is possible because the software enables users to stream data straight from the cloud or, more precisely, stream file segments on demand as needed by a program, such as Adobe Premiere or Photoshop. When requested, data is frequently cached locally, and a single source of truth is maintained in the cloud.

LucidLink periodically creates “snapshots” of the filesystem, enabling users to roll back the filesystem or specific files to a prior version. The snapshots result in what Thompson calls “very efficient” space consumption because they just require a copy of the modified data, not the entire set.

Thompson states, “the new hybrid workplace requires solutions designed for today’s reality.” “Every other product on the market uses syncing, replication, and multiple copying to move data around more quickly or proactively. Because they deal with the largest file sizes and have a workforce that is more likely than others to be remote and hybrid, our customers in the creative industries face particularly challenging issues that make cooperation very tough. The intuitive way LucidLink resolves the issue is the cause of our quick expansion.

The federal government of the United States of America and well-known companies like Adobe (and, hence, Adobe Ventures’ investment), A&E Networks, Whirlpool, Shopify, Buzzfeed, and Spotify are among LucidLink’s clients. When asked if he was worried about possible macroeconomic challenges, Thompson responded that LucidLink, a 123-person San Francisco-based company, anticipates turning a profit after receiving the most recent round of funding. I interpret that as a “no.”

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TECHNOLOGY

Who is Mira Murati, OpenAI’s new interim CEO?

by Lucas Johnson
written by Lucas Johnson

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI and a board of directors member, was unceremoniously removed today in an unexpected move, and CTO Mira Murati was named interim CEO. However, precisely who is Mira Murati?

Murati, who graduated from Dartmouth College with a degree in mechanical engineering, was formerly an intern at Goldman Sachs and subsequently at the French aerospace company Zodiac Aerospace. She worked for Tesla for three years as a senior product manager for the company’s crossover SUV, the Model X. Early iterations of the AI-powered driver-assistance software Autopilot were deployed.

As VP of product and engineering, Murati joined Leap Motion in 2016, a startup developing motion sensors for PCs that tracked motion with the hands and fingers. In an interview with Fast Company, Murati stated that she aimed to make using a computer “as intuitive as playing with a ball.” However, she quickly concluded that the VR headset-based technology was too nascent.

Murati joined OpenAI in 2018 as the vice president of partnerships and applied AI. She oversaw the development of the company’s text-to-image AI DALL-E, the popular AI chatbot ChatGPT, and the code-generating system Codex, which powers GitHub’s Copilot product, after being elevated to CTO in 2022.

What kind of CEO will Murati be in the meantime, then? Maybe she won’t want to cause a stir while the board of directors of OpenAI looks for a long-term replacement. However, based on her interview statements, Murati believes that multimodal models—that is, models like OpenAI’s GPT-4 with Vision, which can comprehend both text and visual context—are the company’s best bet for becoming ultra-capable AI. Furthermore, Murati seems to believe in openly testing this AI to identify bugs and maybe uncover new applications.

To have these models comprehend the world as we do, or to arrive at a more comprehensive grasp of it, was one of the motivations for the DALL-E project, Murati stated to Fast Company. By exposing technology to the real world, you can see how people use it and identify its limitations. You may then utilize this knowledge to inform future technological advancements. The other aspect is that you can genuinely observe how much [the technology is] improving real-world problems or if it is merely innovative.

Murati projects strength. During a Friday company-wide meeting, she allegedly informed OpenAI staff members that “utmost confidence” was placed in OpenAI’s direction by Microsoft’s CEO and CTO, Satya Nadella and Kevin Scott, respectively. Microsoft is one of OpenAI’s significant supporters. She also restated that OpenAI had begun selecting a new CEO.

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