(21st December) Hopin's GM / VP Engineering building something new

Welcome to the 63rd edition of the Geeks Of The Valley (GOTV) Newsletter, where we curate interesting early-stage ventures news 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 ✌️.

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Geeks of the week

Startup Name: Wind

Geography: Singapore

One-liner: Decentralized bank, built on self-custodial wallets that facilitate instant, almost free, global payments.

Founder(s) Background: Co-founder @ Pathao (Bangladesh-based super app; Raised $50m+), Head of BD @ Brankas (SEA-based open finance platform; Series B).

Raised $$ / Backed By (Public Source): Backed by Saison Capital.

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Startup Name: Bestever

Geography: US

One-liner: Video commerce platform supporting brands and local businesses.

Founder(s) Background: Senior Software Engineer @ Uber, Lead Software Engineer @ Apple.

Raised $$ / Backed By (Public Source): NA

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Startup Name: Liquifi

Geography: US

One-liner: Carta for crypto.

Founder(s) Background: Engineering Manager @ Amazon, PM Lead @ Adobe, Product Lead @ Eco (Series B; raised from L Catterton, a16z, Pantera and more).

Raised $$ / Backed By (Public Source): Raised $5m. Backed by Dragonfly, YC, Packy McCormick, Kathryn Haun (Haun Ventures), Balaji and more.

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Founders building in stealth

• GP @ Kleiner Perkins, Ex-CTO @ Hulu & Flipboard

• Head of Product @ MightyHive (9-digits exit)

• Senior Engineer @ Meta (Started a new team in Facebook Ads to help SMBs)

• GM / VP of Engineering @ Hopin

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Venture Ideas & Trends

Justine Moore @venturetwins

It's 2023 prediction season at @a16z 🥳 What am I looking for next year? Companies that unlock access to inventory. Platforms like @Whatnot, @Shopify, and @tiktok_us allow anyone to spin up an online store or sales channel. But these sellers need products to offer...

Itai Damti @itaidamti

Is anyone building the financial operating system for franchise businesses? (financing, banking, bookkeeping & more) Potentially valuable problems to solve & might be something that chains would love for their franchisees.

Mike Volpi 🇺🇦 @mavolpi

This week we published a 4-part AI series (including one of mine!), the result of much debate & discussion as a team. I hope it's just as thought-provoking for you.

indexventures.comThe AI Platform Shift | by Bryan Offutt, Erin Price-Wright, Kelly Toole, Mike Volpi, Cat Wu | Index VenturesArtificial Intelligence has captured our interest and fascination at Index Ventures for many years now. With investments in companies like Scale, Aurora, Covariant, Cohere, Arthur.ai, Lightning, DeepScribe, Gong and many others, we’ve been firm believers and advocates of the incredible potential of…

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Venture Archives

(Today memos provide internal snapshots into the way investors think when it comes to assessing a certain industry. However, there is no centralized source which aggregates investment memos, especially for early-stage ventures. We aim to democratize the access to investment memos through a centralized platform)

Root Ventures investment on Daily - WebRTC video and audio APIs for developers (seed)

Root Ventures originally invested in Daily when it was called Pluot, and coming out of YC. Pluot provided a hardware enterprise video conferencing platform, and later an enterprise software service for video. In mid-2019, Kwin told us about some early customers of a pure API product, and we felt like there was something worth investing in here, both from insiders and potentially new outside capital.. (Read more)