News & Insights

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On the Record with Nate Cavanaugh, CoFounder & Co-CEO of FlowFi

On the Record with Nate Cavanaugh, CoFounder & Co-CEO of FlowFi.

In 2021, Nate co-founded of FlowFi, a SaaS-enabled marketplace that connects startups and SMBs with finance experts. FlowFi has raised $10M from top VC firms including Blumberg Capital, Differential Ventures, Clocktower Ventures and Precursor Ventures, and generated 7-figures of annual recurring revenue in its first year.

Nate was nominated to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list for Enterprise Technology.

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FlowFi Closes on $9M in Seed Funding

TECHCRUNCH: FlowFi, a startup creating a marketplace of finance experts for entrepreneurs, closed on $9 million in seed funding.

Blumberg Capital led the investment and was joined by a group of investors including Parade Ventures, Differential Ventures, Precursor Ventures, Special Ventures, 14 Peaks Capital and Cooley LLP.

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Retrocausal Raises $5.3M in Financing

FINSMES: Retrocausal, a Seattle, WA-based platform provider for manufacturing process management, raised $5.3M in funding.

The round was led by Glasswing Ventures, One Way Ventures, and Indicator Ventures, with participation from existing investors Argon Ventures, Differential Ventures, Ascend Vietnam Ventures, Incubate Fund US, SaaS Ventures, Hypertherm Ventures, Stage Venture Partners, and Techstars.

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Nick Adams Discusses How To Get Your Generative AI Startup Funded

AI and the Future of Work Podcast: Entrepreneurs wonder what it’s like to be a VC. And VCs without an operating background often don’t understand the grit required to turn an idea into a successful business. The best investors have been successful operators first.

Today’s guest is one of those. Nick Adams founded Differential Ventures in 2017 to invest in B2B, data-first seed-stage companies. Since then, Nick and the team have invested in an impressive group of companies including Private AI, Ocrolus, and Agnostiq.

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On the Record with Elissa Ross, CoFounder & CEO of Metafold

On the Record with Elissa Ross, CoFounder & CEO of Metafold. Elissa Ross is a mathematician and the CEO of Toronto-based startup Metafold 3D. Metafold makes an engineering design platform for additive manufacturing, with an emphasis on supporting engineers using metamaterials, lattices and microstructures at industrial scales. Elissa holds a PhD in discrete geometry (2011), and worked as an industrial geometry consultant for the 8 years prior to cofounding Metafold. Metafold is the result of observations made in the consulting context about the challenges and opportunities of 3D printing.

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Nick Adams: What Regulations Need to Be Put in Place to Ensure the Safe Use of AI in the U.S.?

Nick Adams on PM360: To get a better grasp on what eventual AI regulations could and should look like, PM360 spoke with Nick Adams, Founding Partner at Differential Ventures. In addition to starting the venture capital firm focused on AI/machine learning in 2018, Adams is also a member of the cybersecurity and national security subcommittee for the National Venture Capital Association and recently briefed members of Congress on AI policy and potential regulation.

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Metafold 3D Closes $2.35 Million CAD To Fuel Industrial Adoption of 3D Printing

BETAKIT: Metafold 3D, which wants to make it easier for manufacturers to design and 3D print complex parts, has secured $2.35 million CAD ($1.78 million USD) in seed funding.

Toronto-based Metafold was founded in 2020 by a group of math, geometry, and architecture experts in CEO Elissa Ross, CTO Daniel Hambleton, and COO Tom Reslinski. Born out of Hambleton’s geometry-focused consulting agency, Mesh Consultants, Metafold sells design for additive-manufacturing software to sportswear and biopharmaceutical companies.

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Nick Adams: Where’s AI headed in the workplace? VCs weigh in

Nick Adams on TECHBREW: For all the pixels spilled about the promises of generative AI, it’s starting to feel like we’re telling the same story over and over again. AI is serviceable at document summarization and shows promise in customer service applications. But it generates fictions (the industry prefers the euphemistic and anthropomorphizing term “hallucinates”) and is limited by the data on which it’s trained.

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Mona Introduces Free, Self-Service Monitoring for GPT Applications

ATLANTA and TEL AVIV, Israel, June 29, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Mona, the leading intelligent monitoring platform, unveils a new monitoring solution for GPT-based applications. The free, self-service offering provides businesses with granular visibility into GPT-based products and valuable insights into costs, performance, and quality.

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David Magerman: Artificial Intelligence’s Glass Ceiling

David Magerman on THEINFORMATION: OpenAI’s stated goal is to develop and promote a software system capable of artificial general intelligence. Toward that end, the company has released systems based on large-language models, which can respond to prompts with fluent conversation on many subjects. ChatGPT, Microsoft’s Bing chatbot and other new systems based on OpenAI’s GPT-3 and GPT-4 models are truly incredible and perform far beyond previous attempts at achieving AGI.

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Morgan Stanley at Work Launches Carver Edison’s Cashless Participation®

BUSINESSWIRE: Morgan Stanley at Work and Carver Edison, a financial technology company, announced today that Shareworks has joined Equity Edge Online® in offering Cashless Participation® to U.S.-based corporate clients. Since the initial launch of Cashless Participation® on Equity Edge Online®, stock plan participants have purchased more than one million shares1 with Cashless Participation®. Now that Shareworks has also launched the tool, a wider cohort of Morgan Stanley at Work corporate clients will have access.

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Golioth Secures $4.6M Seed Funding to Accelerate Time-to-Market for IoT

IoTForAll: Golioth, a leading developer platform for the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), announced open access to a library of new reference designs for embedded engineers to accelerate their time to market, the launch of a Select Partner Program for energy and construction developers, and the completion of a $4.6M round of seed funding led by Blackhorn Ventures and Differential Ventures with participation from existing investors, Zetta Venture Partners, MongoDB Ventures and Lorimer Ventures.

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PrivateAI’s PrivateGPT aims to combat ChatGPT privacy concerns

VENTURE BEAT: Data privacy provider Private AI, announced the launch of PrivateGPT, a “privacy layer” for large language models (LLMs) such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The new tool is designed to automatically redact sensitive information and personally identifiable information (PII) from user prompts.

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Why Investors Bank on Quantum Commercialization

ENTER QUANTUM: Experts agree that commercial quantum computing at scale could be as much as 10 years away, but this hasn’t stopped investors from betting on it turning a profit in the near future. U.S. tech venture capital company Differential Ventures led the recent $6 million seed extension round for quantum software company Agnostiq which it will use to accelerate further development and commercialization of its enterprise-grade quantum and high-performance computing platform Covalent.

In this Q&A, Differential founding partner David Magerman explains why investors are throwing their weight behind commercial quantum now.

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Banking in Venture Capital & the Tech Industry

On Tuesday, April 25th, 2023, Differential Ventures hosted a webinar on “Banking in Venture Capital & the Tech Industry”. The panel was moderated by David Magerman, Managing Partner of Differential Ventures, and joined by guest speakers Michael Crook (Chief Investment Officer, Mill Creek Capital Advisers), Samir Kaji (CEO & Cofounder, Allocate), and Matt Streisfeld (General Partner, Oak HC/FT).

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