(16th October) Amazon-acq. Head of Growth building TikTok + Netflix for casual gaming (raising)
Welcome to the 47th edition of the Geeks Of The Valley (GOTV) Newsletter, where we curate interesting early-stage/pre-funded companies every week. If you enjoy and want to keep abreast with insights and interesting early-stage startups before they go big, subscribe to this newsletter ✌️.
Geeks of the week
Startup name: Simple Viral Games
Geography: India
One-liner: TikTok + Netflix for casual gaming.
Founder(s) background: Lead PM / Founding PM @ Khatabook ($600m valuation; backed by Sequoia, B Capital, Tencent, RTP Global), Head of Growth @ Perpule (acquired by Amazon), youngest product-hired @ Hike Messenger (India’s Whatsapp rival; raised $175m), engineer @ Gojek.
Raised $$ / backed by (public source): Raising pre-seed round.
Product demo: Link
Startup name: Unwrap.ai
Geography: US
One-liner: Translate your messy customer feedback into actionable roadmap items in minutes.
Founder(s) background: Group PM @ Graphiq (data aggregation and visualization platform; acquired by Amazon), Senior PM @ Amazon Alexa (Alexa's question and answer capabilities team), Senior Technical PM @ Amazon Alexa (Alexa's semantic NLU/NLP engine within the General Knowledge domain).
Raised $$ / backed by (public source): $3m seed round in July 2022.
Startup name: Edge
Geography: US
One-liner: Payment infrastructure for merchants mis-labeled as high-risk.
Founder(s) background: Lead engineer @ Duffl (YC-backed), sales @ Zest AI (backed by Insight Partners, Matrix Partners and Lightspeed).
Raised $$ / backed by (public source): $2.4m pre-seed in June 2022 // backed by Long Journey Ventures, The Fintech Fund, Gaingels, Shreyas Doshi (first PM Manager @ Stripe), Arash Ferdowsi (Dropbox co-founder), and more.