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The ML Prototyping Platform & A Spotify for Online Shopping

June 08, 2023

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Back to our regular programming...

What People Are Building! 🧪

Beam 👨‍💻

Founded: 2021 in US

Founders: Eli Mernit, CEO - ex-Subscription Platform Product Lead @ The New York Times; Luke Lombardi, CTO - ex-Robotics Engineer @ Aescape

Product: Beam enables you to develop on remote GPUs, deploy highly performant APIs, and rapidly prototype ML models—without managing any infrastructure.

Quick Take: Stable Diffusion has unlocked a range of entrepreneurial projects, from Avatars to Magical AI Art Tools. However, there's still a high cost in setting up the dev environment required to iterate on ML models using GPUs. Additionally, if you plan to deploy the stable diffusion solution, you would need to write serving code using frameworks like FastAPI or Flask and expose your instance to the internet. While this process can work, it involves significant overhead in terms of cost and resources.

There are three aspects of Beam which are really powerful:

  • You can develop locally on remote hardware without logging into the cloud and provisioning a GPU

  • You can deploy apps as serverless web endpoints, so you only pay for actual compute usage

  • Your apps will scale to zero when idle and scale up automatically with traffic. This makes Beam an excellent fit for projects that use GPU with infrequent usage patterns.

Total Funding (public source): $3,500,000+

Chestr 🏷️

Founded: 2022 in US

Founders: Besart Çopa, CEO - ex-Intern @ Andreessen Horowitz (Marketing), Citibank (Data Analytics), Logitech (Business Development); Isaac Fung, CTO - ex-Software Engineer Intern @ Deliverr Inc., Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Product: Chestr is a universal wishlist app that lets users save items and track discounts from any stores online. In 6 months, Chestr beta users saved more than 14,000 items from 8000+ different stores, with a user base of over 1400+.

Quick Take: There’s no easy, quick way of saving products and tracking discounts from different stores online. Pinterest, although popular, is not optimized for shopping, making it time-consuming to save just one image. Similarly, Karma is often considered spammy when it comes to discount monitoring. On the other hand, CamelCamelCamel, an older platform, may not meet the modern needs of users. As a result, many people resort to taking screenshots or copying and pasting links, which is inconvenient and inefficient.

Chestr stands out by catering to Gen Z1 users with its fast and super-sleek UX/UI design, making it perfect for both collecting and curating wishlists. The app aims to provide the most delightful and interactive experiences tailored specifically for passionate online shoppers and curators. A place where users can be influenced by the purchases and reviews of people they trust. A place where they can also get hyper-personalized product recommendations based on their wishlists.

Total Funding (public source): $625,000

Investors: Neo

Do you know of a startup that we should write about in our newsletter? Please send us a reply!

Fresh Powder 💸

  • Dock, a client-facing workspace for revenue teams, raised $3.5 million in Seed funding from Craft Ventures, bringing their total capital raised to $6.5 million. The funding will accelerate product development.

  • Argus Labs secured $10 million in Seed funding led by Haun Ventures, with participation from Robot Ventures, Anagram, Dispersion Capital, Alchemy, and angel investors. Their flagship product, the World Engine SDK, enables game developers to create customized layer-2 blockchain networks on Ethereum using zero-knowledge proofs (ZKP).

Treasure Trove 💎

  • Do you wonder about where to live as the climate changes? Is your house Habitable? Habitable's free climate risk tool gives you an instant snapshot of your property's risk for flood, fire, heat and drought. Plus, a weekly newsletter featuring interesting news on climate and real estate. Try Habitable here.

  • A guide for founders on how much to raise in their first round: In the early stages of a startup, founders often grapple with the question of how much they can realistically raise in their first round of funding. To navigate this process, two key dimensions to consider are "Founder Pedigree" and "Traction." Founder Pedigree encompasses the founders' track record, industry knowledge, and network, while Traction refers to the startup's progress and momentum.

  • Zume, a robot pizza startup that raised nearly $500 million from investors such as Softbank and AME Cloud Ventures, has closed down. The company faced significant technological challenges that resulted in prominent team members leaving and financial difficulties.

  • Sequoia is splitting into three VC firms: Sequoia Capital, representing the U.S. and Europe; HongShan in China; and Peak XV Partners in India and Southeast Asia. The split is expected to be finalized by March 2024. Peak XV Partners plans to deploy approximately $2.5 billion, which it raised last year.

Job Openings 💼

Housekeeping 👇

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