Innovations in Photography and Rental Commerce

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Welcome to the 34th edition of our newsletter, where we feature the most exciting early-stage startups, job openings, and valuable resources, all in a single newsletter.

Now, let's delve right into what's in store for this week.

Sponsored by Masterworks

Billionaires wanted it, but 54,578 everyday investors got it first… and profited

When incredibly rare and valuable assets come up for sale, it's typically the wealthiest people that end up taking home an amazing investment. But not always…

One platform is taking on the billionaires at their own game, buying up and fractionalizing some of history’s most prized blue-chip artworks for its investors.

It's called Masterworks. Their nearly $1 billion collection includes works by greats like Banksy, Picasso, and Basquiat, all of which are collectively owned by everyday investors. When Masterworks sells a painting – like the 16 it's already sold – investors reap their portion of the  profits.

Offerings can sell out in minutes, but Open Scout readers can skip the waitlist to join with this exclusive link.1

Startups to watch

GLASS Imaging

TL;DR: A new type of camera — better photography

In a world where DSLR-level photography capabilities are now available in the palm of your hand, GLASS Imaging is leading the charge to push the boundaries of smartphone photography.

To put this transformation into perspective, consider the journey from the first camera phones in 2000, which could store just around 20 low-resolution (0.11 to 0.35 megapixels) photos and required a computer to view snapshots, to today's Apple iPhone 15 Pro Max, boasting a 12-megapixel 5x Telephoto feature at 120 mm with an ƒ/2.8 aperture, a 48-megapixel f/1.78 primary camera, and a 12-megapixel f/2.2 120° ultra-wide camera.

Yet, improving these cameras further is increasingly challenging, as the confines of a cubic centimeter leave little room for growth. To enhance image quality, one needs a larger sensor, better lenses, or innovative computational techniques. However, larger sensors require bigger lenses, which mobile devices can't accommodate. Computational photography, while impressive, has its limits, offering diminishing returns beyond a certain point.

This is where GLASS Imaging steps in, with a vision to revolutionize smartphone camera capabilities by combining unique optics, computational photography, and artificial intelligence.

Their pioneering approach involves replacing traditional glass lenses2 with deep neural networks. This would give extreme flexibility when designing cameras. As a result, mobile phone manufacturers can incorporate sizable sensors into remarkably slim modules that seamlessly integrate into mobile devices, eliminating the need for protruding camera bumps.

Founded: 2019, US

Team: Ziv Attar (CEO) - ex-Camera Algorithms @Apple (lead various computational photography projects including the famous Portrait Mode that launched with the iPhone 7+ and its derivatives), CEO & Co-founder @ LinX Imaging (acquired by Apple in 2015); Tom Bishop (CTO) - ex-Director of Machine Learning Research @ Intuition Machines, Image Algorithms Engineer @ Apple; Fabio Riccardi (Chief Scientist) - ex-Machine Learning Researcher @ Cerebras Systems, Google (TensorFlow GPU acceleration for Mobile)

Industry: Industrials—Manufacturing and Robotics

Funding: US$2.2M (Seed)

Investors: LDV Capital, Ground Up Ventures

Flecto

TL;DR: Shopify for rentals

Rental businesses have long grappled with the challenge of streamlining their operations, often resorting to outdated tools like Excel for inventory management and email/calendar systems for order tracking. Lead generation, too, remains a major hurdle, forcing companies to invest substantial time and effort across various channels for inquiries and customer management.

This fragmented experience results in daily time losses as business owners struggle to monitor inventory, engage with new leads, and process bookings. The net effect is a disorganized ordeal that hampers customer interactions and consumes excessive time on mundane offline tasks.

Flecto offers a transformative solution: a digital hub tailor-made for rental businesses that seamlessly integrates with the comprehensive Flecto suite. It boasts features for inventory management, customer interactions, booking handling, and even insurance integration—an all-in-one platform designed to help businesses thrive in the circular economy.3

Embracing a rental model not only facilitates a higher product turnover but also extends the life cycle of items, ultimately reducing the demand for non-renewable resources and minimizing unnecessary CO2 emissions.

Founded: 2016, Portugal

Team: Guilherme Guerra (CEO), Francisco Bento (CPO), João Ferreira Loff (CTO)

Industry: Marketplace

Funding: US$1.3M (Seed)

Investors: Techstars, Übermorgen Ventures, Maze X, Mustard Seed Maze, Semapa Next

Which early-stage startup should we feature next? Send us a reply. (Criteria: Pre-Seed, Seed, and Series A startups)

Deals

• Modal Labs, a cloud-based infrastructure provider for data teams and app developers, has raised $16 million in a Series A round led by Redpoint Ventures, with participation from Amplify Partners, Lux Capital, and Definition Capital.

• Anysphere, a startup developing an "AI-native" software development environment called Cursor, has secured $8 million in Seed funding led by OpenAI's Startup Fund, with participation from former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, Dropbox co-founder Arash Ferdowsi, and other angel investors.

• Deta, a Berlin-based startup specializing in Personal Cloud Computers (PCC), has raised $3.6 million (€3.3 million) in a Seed funding round led by Crane Venture Partners. The round also saw participation from System.One, Tomahawk.VC, Tiny.VC, AngelInvest Ventures, Acequia Capital, and angel investors.

• AMD has acquired Nod.ai, an open-source AI software provider, to bolster its AI development tools and ecosystem around its hardware. (Press Release)

• Collaborative software giant Atlassian acquires video messaging startup Loom for $975 million, marking a 35% decline from Loom's previous $1.5 billion valuation after a $130 million Series C funding round in May 2021. Loom will remain a standalone product and be integrated into Atlassian's collaboration tools like Jira and Confluence.

Thinking about profitability, extending your runway & improving operations efficiency? Propeller’s fractional CFO model offers a dynamic solution that provides a cost-effective option to hiring full-time finance talent.

More for your eyeballs

• 10 Places to Find Product-Market Fit (NFX)

• 4 Ways to Successfully Use Customer Journey Maps ()

• Bear Necessities ()

• Sequoia discusses the present condition of the AI market and its future direction

Who's hiring

• Superpower (health tools for the highly ambitious) is hiring a Founding Full Stack Engineer with 3-10 years of experience as a full-stack engineer.

• Causal (aiming to replace Excel) is hiring a Backend Engineer—Data with 4+ years of customer-facing experience.

• Azuki (a decentralized brand) is hiring a Front-End Engineer with 5-8 years of experience in software engineering in the games industry.

• Mintlify (AI powered documentation writer) is hiring a Software Engineer—Customer with 4+ years of technical experience and a Head of Design with 5+ years of experience in product design.

• Grit (focused on solving technical debt) is hiring a Senior/Staff Software Engineer with 4+ years of experience as a software developer.

Interested in any of these jobs? Send us a reply for more info or a referral.

That's a wrap for this week.

Thank you for sticking with us until the finish.

We're open to hearing your suggestions for future newsletter topics, so feel free to share what you're grappling with or what you'd like to see from us in upcoming editions.

Have a great week.

Kenneth ✌️