Getaround aims to scale car-sharing platform with HyreCar acquisition

Peer-to-peer car sharing company Getaround said Thursday it will acquire the assets of HyreCar, another car sharing marketplace, for $9.45 million. Getaround expects to realize up to $75 million of run rate annualized gross booking value from the deal, which the company says will contribute to positive adjusted EBITDA profitability.

“At this acquisition price point, we believe this deal will deliver strong long-term value for Getaround stakeholders,” said Sam Zaid, CEO and founder of Getaround, in a statement.

Getaround’s stock soared 135% in after hours trading on the news, reaching a high of $0.80. That spike was still not enough to bring Getaround back into compliance with the New York Stock Exchange, which issued a delisting warning in January because the company’s stock price was trading below the $1 mark over a 30 trading-day period.

Getaround first debuted on the public markets in December after merging with a special purpose acquisition company. The combined company’s stock began trading at around $10 per share, but promptly plummeted. To date, Getaround’s stock has lost 96% of its value.

Since the start of 2023, Getaround has received separate delisting warnings from the NYSE because its global market capitalization over a 30 trading-day period was less than $50 million and because it did not file timely earnings reports with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

Getaround still hasn’t reported fourth-quarter and full year 2022 earnings, despite the fact that we are well into the second-quarter of 2023 and other companies are now reporting first-quarter earnings. A spokesperson for the company said the delay is because Getaround is “finalizing a very technical post-SPAC accounting process and audit” and expects to report “in the coming weeks.”

Until then, the best insight we have into Getaround’s financials is the “selected preliminary unaudited financial results” for 2022 that the company shared on March 31, which say Getaround closed the year with $64.3 million in cash and cash equivalents. That money will likely be used to fund the HyreCar acquisition; Getaround said it will pay for the startup with cash on hand and expects the deal to close May 16.

Getaround has historically pursued a strategy of scaling aggressively, which has given it a network that Getaround claims is 20x larger than its nearest competitor. That scale, however, has come at the cost of sustainability. According to Getaround’s third-quarter 2022 earnings, the company’s revenue declined and operating costs increased for the first three quarters of 2022 compared to the year prior.

The HyreCar acquisition might result in a similar outcome, providing Getaround with scale and reach while ultimately increasing costs of operations.

HyreCar’s assets include access to its community of tens of thousands of gig drivers, but that healthy demand was part of why HyreCar declared bankruptcy. The company reportedly had more demand than it did access to vehicles, and had been attempting to solve that problem by forming a joint venture with AmeriDrive, a large fleet operator. That deal fell through, followed by an $8 million debenture transaction that never closed and mounting legal fees from an array lawsuits and investigations. HyreCar filed for bankruptcy in February.

Used car rental dealership Holmes Auto had agreed to buy HyreCar for $7.75 million, but Getaround outbid the company at auction earlier this week.

HyreCar brings other assets to the table, including extensive user data and strong risk management solutions, according to Zaid. We’ll keep our eyes on how the buy contributes to Getaround’s financials and operational costs in the long run.

Getaround aims to scale car-sharing platform with HyreCar acquisition by Rebecca Bellan originally published on TechCrunch

https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/11/getaround-aims-to-scale-car-sharing-platform-with-hyrecar-acquisition/

Nexon takes 20-year-old MapleStory into web3 with Haechi’s help

Nexon, one of the biggest gaming companies in the world, is wading into web3 like some of its peers in Asia. The developer of MapleStory is creating a blockchain-powered ecosystem based on the twenty-year-old massively multiplayer online game, where players can trade in-game assets like outfits, equipment and virtual pets in the form of non-fungible tokens.

Around 160,000 people in South Korea are still playing MapleStory today, the company wrote recently in a blog citing data from KMS.

Blockchain games have been cropping up everywhere in the past two years, but few have entered the mainstream and even the popular ones, like the play-to-earn game Axie Infinity, have been short-lived.

Nexon pledges to create more sustainable crypto games. “There was a time when the perception of ‘blockchain = P2E’ was widely accepted, and there was a lot of talk about using blockchain to make games that make money,” Angela Son, Nexon’s blockchain business development and partnership lead, told TechCrunch in a text message.

“But since, the market has changed, and there are more creators who want to use blockchain to seriously develop games.”

It’s still too early to say if MapleStory N, Nexon’s first blockchain game, and MapleStory Universe, the NFT ecosystem based on the classic game’s IP, will ever reach the heights of their web2 version. Nexon has a rosy outlook, of course.

“MapleStory has more than 180 million accumulative global users, and there are even more people who love the MapleStory IP. We anticipate that MapleStory N and MapleStory Universe will be enjoyed by many players,” said Son.

The main criticism of play-to-earn games is their flawed economies, where gamers purchase NFTs only to create and sell these digital goods to those who buy in after them. Nexon isn’t going down the pyramid scheme-like path.

In MapleStory N, there is no cash shop and players acquire items through gameplay like completing quests and defeating monsters. If people don’t get what they want, they can acquire items from others through the ecosystem’s secondary NFT marketplace. Eventually, players can also trade their in-game assets on external marketplaces, according to Son.

Onboarding the masses

Nexon is working with a handful of partners to enable its transition into web3. The firm already announced that the digital goods of MapleStory Universe will trade on Polygon, an Ethereum scaling solution that’s popular amongst game developers. Today, the South Korean gaming firm said it’s teaming up with another web3 company, Haechi Labs, a crypto auditing and wallet solution provider used by over 500 companies.

“A host of gaming companies started knocking on our door after seeing Axie Infinity’s success since Haechi Labs has been offering smart contract security auditing and wallet solutions in the past 5 years,” the company’s CEO Geon-gi Moon told TechCrunch in a written response.

“Nowhere else do you see such a high number of executives at AAA game companies so bullish on integrating their games with blockchain, but South Korea.”

Most existing decentralized applications require users to log in via their crypto wallets. But what if people have no prior web3 experience? Haechi is touting Face Wallet, which allows users to log into crypto games like MapleStory N through their existing accounts with Google, Facebook, Apple, Discord and Kakao.

Once logged in, users will gain access to their Face Wallet accounts. Anyone who’s used a self-custodial wallet like MetaMask knows the stress of trying to keep their 16-word seed phrase safe. Losing one’s seed phrase means losing access to the wallet permanently. Custodial solutions are easy to use, but on the other hand, asset owners are exposed to the risk the platform could get hacked or go bust.

Face Wallet is trying to solve the custodian dilemma by offering a self-custodial wallet that allows users to log in with a six-digit password and gives them the option to recover passcodes.

This is how it works: When a user creates a wallet via Face Wallet, its key is split into two encrypted “shares”, explained Moon. Share 1 is stored in a secure infrastructure environment and, usually, also in the user’s device. Share 2 is kept in the Face Wallet team’s repository. The decrypted keys are never shared with Haechi; nor can Haechi decrypt either of the encrypted keys, added Moon.

Haechi isn’t the only one trying to make self-hosted wallets more user-friendly. The Ethereum community itself is tackling this issue through a major technical upgrade called “account abstraction” and developers, such as venture-backed Soul Wallet, are racing to introduce wallets powered by smart contract capabilities.

Nexon takes 20-year-old MapleStory into web3 with Haechi’s help by Rita Liao originally published on TechCrunch

https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/11/nexon-maplestory-blockchain-crypto-haechi-web3/

NBCUniversal’s Linda Yaccarino Is in Talks to Become Twitter CEO

Yaccarino is chairman of global advertising and partnerships at NBCU. Twitter owner Elon Musk said earlier he had picked a new chief executive without naming the person.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/new-twitter-ceo-elon-musk-7a006bb5?mod=rss_Technology

Intuitive Machines prepares for first lunar mission, faces challenge to NASA contract win

Intuitive Machines is preparing for its first lunar mission to the moon’s south pole in the third quarter of this year, while also facing a protest to a major NASA contract win, executives told investors Thursday.

The company has made “significant progress” on testing for the inaugural IM-1 mission, Intuitive Machines CEO Steve Altemus said during a first-quarter earnings call. He added that he expects the lander to be at the launch pad in “mid-to-late Q3.” During that mission, the company will attempt to land its spacecraft, Nova-C, on the lunar surface — and will be the first totally private company to do so. The company is currently assessing the landing spot on the moon for a follow-up mission.

Intuitive Machines went public via a merger with a special-purpose acquisition company in February. The company reported first-quarter revenues of $18.2 million, with a cash balance of $46.8 million as of the end of the quarter. Additionally, Intuitive Machines reported a backlog of $156.1 million, of which $107.7 million is anticipated to turn into revenue before the year’s end.

“We have always been and will continue to be a capital efficient company,” CFO Erik Sallee said. “We will allocate capital to the highest risk-adjusted returns in a disciplined manner. As a private Company, we were mostly self funded, so we know how to live within our means.”

The company also disclosed that it was facing a protest to its win of a $719 million NASA contract, though Altemus told investors that protests are a fairly common occurrence within the procurement process.

“We know from the statistics that less than 10% of those protests are actually overturned, so we have high confidence in our value offerings to the government,” Altemus said. “We’re confident that once we get through this 100-day protest period for the [Government Accountability Office] that the award will stand.”

Science Applications International Corporation filed the protest against the award on May 8. The firm did not make a copy of the protest available to view, nor does the Government Accountability Office — the federal office where companies may protest contract awards — post them on its website.

NASA awarded the $719 million, five-year contract to a joint venture of Intuitive Machines and KBR named Space Networks Solution. The contract, Omnibus Multidiscipline Engineering Services (OMES) III, is meant to broadly fund engineering work related to the Joint Polar Satellite System and other NASA projects. NASA announced the winning bidder on April 19.

Provided that GAO adjudicates the protest in Intuitive Machines’ favor, the company said it will begin work on the contract in the fourth quarter. With it, the lunar company’s full-year revenue could come in between $174 million and $268 million.

The company, which is listed under the ticker symbol $LUNR, was trading at $8.25 by close of markets Thursday.

Intuitive Machines prepares for first lunar mission, faces challenge to NASA contract win by Aria Alamalhodaei originally published on TechCrunch

https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/11/intuitive-machines-prepares-for-first-lunar-mission-faces-challenge-to-nasa-contract-win/

Polestar and Volvo are the latest automakers caught in software purgatory

Software, it turns out, is hard for automakers. And building a so-called software-defined car — the term du jour in automotive circles — is even harder.

Software development problems have led to executive shakeups at VW Group, bricked vehicles, recalls and generally unpleasant vehicle experiences. Now, Polestar and Volvo Cars have gotten caught up in the endless gyre of software development. Both companies delayed the launch of their next EV because of software development snags. 

Polestar said Thursday as part of its first-quarter earnings report that final software development of its new all-electric platform shared by Volvo Cars is needed and that the start of production of Polestar 3 has been pushed to the first quarter of 2024. Polestar and Volvo Cars are owned by the same parent company Geely Holdings. Polestar went public via a merger with a special-purpose acquisition company in June 2022. Volvo Cars remains a majority shareholder of Polestar.

“In light of this and the economic environment affecting the automotive industry, Polestar now expects 2023 global volumes of 60,000 – 70,000 vehicles, representing annual growth of 16% – 36%, following record deliveries of 51,491 last year,” the company said.

Polestar said the Polestar 4 is still expected to make its market debut in China in the fourth quarter of 2023. The Polestar 4 will head to other markets in early 2024.

Meanwhile, over at Volvo Cars, the same story is playing out. The company said Thursday it won’t begin producing the all-electric Volvo EX90 until the first half of 2024 because it needs additional time in software development and testing. Production was supposed to start at the end of 2023.

VW Group also recently delayed its software development plans. Earlier this week, the company ousted top leadership at its software arm Cariad and brought in Bentley executive Peter Bosch to put it back on track.

Software 1.1 version is found in Volkswagen vehicles today. The software 1.2. platform is being developed for Audi and Porsche cars, while the 2.0 version will be an operating system designed for all VW Group brands. But efforts are at least two years behind schedule. The software 1.2 platform was supposed to be completed in 2022. Now Cariad is working to complete it this year to be ready for 2024 VW models.

VW Group pushed back the launch of 2.0 until 2027 or 2028.

Polestar and Volvo are the latest automakers caught in software purgatory by Kirsten Korosec originally published on TechCrunch

https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/11/polestar-and-volvo-are-the-latest-automakers-caught-in-software-purgatory/

Daily Crunch: For second consecutive quarter, millions of subscribers drop Disney+ Hotstar

A merger or acquisition is the start of a new relationship, which is why most people approach exits with optimism.

“But all’s not rosy in the world of M&A,” says SmartBear CEO Frank Roe, who’s completed eight acquisitions in less than five years.

“It is a complex and substantially risky decision, not for the faint-hearted. It is essential to approach the decision and process with diligence and forethought.”

In this TC+ guest post, he shares “five indispensable elements to consider for a successful mergers and acquisitions journey,” reminding readers that “there’s no ‘secret formula.’”

To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here.

Happy Thursday, Crunchers! It’s an exciting time to be a tech reporter, with a ton of fun stories coming down the pipe. So let’s get to it! Hasta mañana, Christine and Haje

The TechCrunch Top 3

Startups and VC

Most U.S.-based tech investors are likely familiar with smaller-ticket investor marketplaces AngelList and Carta. In Europe, Germany’s Bunch and the U.K.’s Vauban (acquired by by U.S.-based Carta last year) have attempted to do a similar job. But the backstory to this is that although launching many years ago, AngelList struggled with Europe’s regulatory environment. Mike wonders if Odin could be Europe’s answer to AngelList.

It used to be that having a corporate blog and some paid content was the gist of your marketing department’s content efforts, and that was enough. But as larger companies like Salesforce and HubSpot have launched their own full-blown media arms, it may be time to rethink your content strategy. AudiencePlus wants to help every company run its own media platform, and today the company announced a $5.4 million seed investment, Ron reports.

Another smattering of highlights and lowlights:

Unlocking the M&A code: 5 factors that can make (or break) a deal

Image Credits: mjrodafotografia (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

A merger or acquisition is the start of a new relationship, which is why most people approach exits with optimism.

“But all’s not rosy in the world of M&A,” says SmartBear CEO Frank Roe, who’s completed eight acquisitions in less than five years.

“It is a complex and substantially risky decision, not for the faint-hearted. It is essential to approach the decision and process with diligence and forethought.”

In this TC+ guest post, he shares “five indispensable elements to consider for a successful mergers and acquisitions journey,” reminding readers that “there’s no ‘secret formula.’”

Three more from the TC+ team:

TechCrunch+ is our membership program that helps founders and startup teams get ahead of the pack. You can sign up here. Use code “DC” for a 15% discount on an annual subscription!

Big Tech Inc.

Natasha L gives you everything you need to know and more about a series of votes in the European Parliament this morning where MEPs have backed a raft of amendments related to transparency and safety rules for generative AI.

Meanwhile, Amanda reports on a movement that started with a tweet and ended with a book in the top 3 on Amazon. No, it’s not another book in the “Fifty Shades of Grey” saga — it’s a recommendation by “Bigolas Dickolas,” and we recommend you stop what you’re doing and read.

And we have five more for you:

Daily Crunch: For second consecutive quarter, millions of subscribers drop Disney+ Hotstar by Christine Hall originally published on TechCrunch

https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/11/daily-crunch-for-second-consecutive-quarter-millions-of-subscribers-drop-disney-hotstar/

Meta announces generative AI features for advertisers

Meta today announced an AI Sandbox for advertisers to help them create alternative copies, background generation through text prompts and image cropping for Facebook or Instagram ads.

The first feature lets brands generate different variations of the same copy for different audiences while trying to keep the core message of the ad similar. The background generation feature makes it easier to create different assets for a campaign. Finally, the image cropping feature helps companies create visuals in different aspect ratios for various mediums, such as social posts, stories, or short videos like Reels.

The company said that these features are available to select advertisers at the moment and it will expand access to more advertisers in July.

“Currently, we’re working with a small group of advertisers in order to quickly gather feedback that we can use to make these products even better. In July, we will begin gradually expanding access to more advertisers with plans to add some of these features into our products later this year,” it said in a blog post.

Meta’s announcement comes after the company’s CTO Andrew Bosworth said last month that the company was looking to use generative AI tech for ads.

“[I] expect we’ll start seeing some of them [commercialization of the tech] this year. We just created a new team, the generative AI team, a couple of months ago; they are very busy. It’s probably the area that I’m spending the most time [in], as well as Mark Zuckerberg and [Chief Product Officer] Chris Cox,” Bosworth told Nikkei Asia in an interview at the time.

Meta had positive quarterly results for Q1 2023. The company beat analyst expectations and posted year-on-year revenue growth for the first time in three quarters. Mark Zuckerberg mentioned that, while the tech giant has started working on different AI tools, it remained committed to metaverse development.

While Meta is releasing some lightweight generative AI features for advertisers, some ad tech startups are heavily leaning into it. Omneky, which presented at TechCrunch Disrupt last year, used OpenAI’s DALLE-2 and GPT-3 to create ads. Movio, which counts IDG, Sequoia Capital China, and Baidu Ventures as its backers, is using generative AI to create marketing videos as well.

Meta announces generative AI features for advertisers by Ivan Mehta originally published on TechCrunch

https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/11/meta-announces-generative-ai-features-for-advertisers/

Anthropic’s latest model can take ‘The Great Gatsby’ as input

Historically and even today, poor memory has been an impediment to the usefulness of text-generating AI. As a recent piece in The Atlantic aptly puts it, even sophisticated generative text AI like ChatGPT has the memory of a goldfish. Each time the model generates a response, it takes into account only a very limited amount of text — preventing it from, say, summarizing a book or reviewing a major coding project.

But Anthropic’s trying to change that.

Today, the AI research startup announced that it’s expanded the context window for Claude — its flagship text-generating AI model, still in preview — from 9,000 tokens to 100,000 tokens. Context window refers to the text the model considers before generating additional text, while tokens represent raw text (e.g., the word “fantastic” would be split into the tokens “fan,” “tas” and “tic”).

So what’s the significance, exactly? Well, as alluded to earlier, models with small context windows tend to “forget” the content of even very recent conversations — leading them to veer off topic. After a few thousand words or so, they also forget their initial instructions, instead extrapolating their behavior from the last information within their context window rather than from the original request.

Given the benefits of large context windows, it’s not surprising that figuring out ways to expand them has become a major focus of AI labs like OpenAI, which devoted an entire team to the issue. OpenAI’s GPT-4 held the previous crown in terms of context window sizes, weighing in at 32,000 tokens on the high end — but the improved Claude API blows past that.

With a bigger “memory,” Claude should be able to converse relatively coherently for hours — several days, even — as opposed to minutes. And perhaps more importantly, it should be less likely to go off the rails.

In a blog post, Anthropic touts the other benefits of Claude’s increased context window, including the ability for the model to digest and analyze hundreds of pages of materials. Beyond reading long texts, the upgraded Claude can help retrieve information from multiple documents or even a book, Anthropic says, answering questions that require “synthesis of knowledge” across many parts of the text.

Anthropic lists a few possible use cases:

  • Digesting, summarizing, and explaining documents such as financial statements or research papers
  • Analyzing risks and opportunities for a company based on its annual reports
  • Assessing the pros and cons of a piece of legislation
  • Identifying risks, themes, and different forms of argument across legal documents.
  • Reading through hundreds of pages of developer documentation and surfacing answers to technical questions
  • Rapidly prototyping by dropping an entire codebase into the context and intelligently building on or modifying it

“The average person can read 100,000 tokens of text in around five hours, and then they might need substantially longer to digest, remember, and analyze that information,” Anthropic continues. “Claude can now do this in less than a minute. For example, we loaded the entire text of The Great Gatsby into Claude … and modified one line to say Mr. Carraway was ‘a software engineer that works on machine learning tooling at Anthropic.’ When we asked the model to spot what was different, it responded with the correct answer in 22 seconds.”

Now, longer context windows don’t solve the other memory-related challenges around large language models. Claude, like most models in its class, can’t retain information from one session to the next. And unlike the human brain, it treats every piece of information as equally important, making it a not particularly reliable narrator. Some experts believe that solving these problems will require entirely new model architectures.

For now, though, Anthropic appears to be at the forefront.

Anthropic’s latest model can take ‘The Great Gatsby’ as input by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch

https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/11/anthropics-latest-model-can-take-the-great-gatsby-as-input/

TechCrunch is heading to London for London Tech Week

It’s certainly been a minute but we’re bringing some of the TechCrunch crew across the pond during London Tech Week to meet up with U.K.-based investors and rising early-stage founders. We’ll be hosting an intimate invitation-only cocktail hour on Tuesday, June 13, so if you’ll be around, apply now for a chance to join us! We’ll be accepting applications until May 26 and we’ll let you know by June 1 if you’ve snagged one of these exclusive spots to mingle with some of the U.K.’s most prominent influencers in the startup community!

TechCrunch is heading to London for London Tech Week by Emma Comeau originally published on TechCrunch

https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/11/city-mixer-london-2023/

‘AI-powered’ VC firm Vela emerges from stealth with $25M under management

Six years ago, Yiğit Ihlamur, a former senior program manager at Google, observed that AI was surpassing human capabilities in certain areas — at least by his estimation. Equipped with this perspective, he looked into various sectors with the goal of tackling a problem that he could work on for the rest of his life.

“At an abstract level, I was intrigued by the idea of accelerating innovation, because innovation creates new products, services and experiences that were previously unimaginable,” Ihlamur told TechCrunch in an email interview. “I perceived delivering capital to innovation as a math problem and started coding and hacking my way in.”

Ihlamur decided to focus on the VC space, which he saw as behind in terms of leveraging automation and AI. With the help of several co-founders, he launched Vela Partners, a VC firm that he describes as “AI-powered” and “product-led.”

Vela is an early-stage VC with $25 million under management and 32 portfolio companies, including self-checkout startup Grabango and robotics firm Bear Robotics. Like all VCs, Vela determines — partly using predictive algorithms — new investment areas as it attempts to identify trends, source the right opportunities and suss out threats to its existing investments.

To train its predictive algorithms, Vela draws on websites and social networks for data, also leveraging paid datasets like Crunchbase.

“Vela provides market intelligence and insights of innovative ideas; hence technical decision makers can decide which tools to buy or build to grow their core businesses,” Ihlamur said. “Models must be informative and explanatory. Ultimately our approach marries AI with expert heuristics.”

Inevitably, of course, algorithms amplify the biases in the data on which they’re trained — and this can have major consequences in the VC realm. In an experiment in November 2020, Harvard Business Review (HBR) found that an investment recommendation algorithm tended to pick white entrepreneurs rather than entrepreneurs of color and preferred investing in startups with male founders. Experts uncovered similar issues with CB Insights’ Mosaic tool, which uses proxies for race, socioeconomic status, gender and disability to determine a person’s likelihood of success.

Ihlamur somewhat dodged questions around bias, acknowledging that it comes with the territory — but not necessarily offering a solution.

“A model can learn the biases of other VCs or biases of the past,” he said. “First, one needs to understand the underlying reason why these behaviors occurred in the venture market. Second, every problem is unique, and a generalized approach cannot work for everything.”

Bias issues aside, Bay Area–based Vela isn’t the first to develop algorithmic tools to inform its investment decisions. VC firms, including SignalFire, EQT Ventures and Nauta Capital, are using AI-powered platforms to flag potential top picks.

The differentiator for Vela, according to Ihlamur, is its “game-like” terminal built to assist entrepreneurs, limited partners and other VCs in using its services. Entrepreneurs can analyze tendencies in developer ecosystems like Amazon Web Services and GitHub, while whitelisted VCs can spot (with any luck) promising seed-stage startups and limited partners can ask questions about why Vela invested in a particular startup.

Vela’s GitHub repo, which includes its algorithmic models, is public — both for inspection and reuse.

“While some VCs may be experimenting with AI-based sourcing, we haven’t seen any VC taking a product-led approach,” Ihlamur said. “Anyone can go to Vela’s website and use our product. We’re building relationships with entrepreneurs and limited partners in a programmatic way — our ultimate goal is for AI and automation to touch and manage all aspects of our business.”

It’s an approach that’s worked well for Vela so far. The firm claims to be running at “break-even” level, leading or co-leading $500,000 to $1.5 million check sizes.

In the near term, Vela plans to invest mainly in AI, data and developer-focused startups. Ihlamur expressed enthusiasm for generative AI specifically, a market that could be worth $51.8 billion by 2028 — depending on which sources you believe.

“The pandemic had a positive impact on our business, as was the case for many other venture capital firms,” Ihlamur said. “OpenAI’s ChatGPT’s release provided further tailwinds for us as an AI-powered VC firm … With respect to the broader slowdown in tech, we’re not concerned as we’re break-even as a company and have capital to invest. Despite the slowdown, there are significant opportunities to seize partially thanks to the rapid progress in AI.”

‘AI-powered’ VC firm Vela emerges from stealth with $25M under management by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch

https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/11/ai-powered-vc-firm-vela-emerges-from-stealth-with-25m-under-management/