Anne Augusta Blum’s Post

Angular Ventures is a venture capital firm that seeks to invest in companies operating in the artificial intelligence, data learning, natural language processing, machine learning, developer tools, industrial, fintech, infrastructure, security and workflow automation sectors. Angular Ventures is a specialist first-check venture capital firm committed to founders redefining global markets. They work closely with founders whose ambitions align with theirs. They’re firm believers in the value of meaningful barriers to entry. The founders they work with have a clear pathway to establish sustainable barriers to entry, often grounded in technical depth. They back companies that sell products and services to other companies, as they’re well-positioned to help them. https://lnkd.in/gzrXP2cM #venturecapital #firm #enterprenuers

Check out what Matt Kindy has cooking and how it could help scale and build better, more efficient teams!

HOT TAKE: Early stage venture is doomed. 📉 Generative AI is commoditizing software. In this new reality, the venture landscape is facing a generational reckoning and must adapt in order to survive or risk radical disruption. How so, you might ask? Check out my thoughts in The GenAI Collective’s latest community newsletter! https://lnkd.in/gpTmePtn

Don’t know who needs to hear this, but… ◽ The “we’ll sleep when we launch” startup often burns out before beta. Remember, pace wins the race—not just speed. ◽ The founder who talks most about disruptive tech is usually the one looking up "What is an API?" late at night. ◽ The “work-life harmony” advice from tech billionaires often skips the chaos that got them there. ◽ Every "game-changing algorithm" is often just a tweaked version of an existing one. ◽ The MVP that got rave reviews? It probably went through more pivots than a ballerina before hitting the mark. ◽ “Let’s scale fast and fix things later” can sometimes lead to more fixing than scaling. ◽ That $1 million valuation might actually be $400k in real funding, $300k in optimistic projections, and $300k in buzzwords.

🚀 Exciting News Alert! 🚀 Thrilled to announce that Orkes, the application orchestration platform, has secured a whopping $20 million in its latest funding round! Nexus Venture Partners led the investment, with participation from Battery Ventures and Vertex Ventures US. The funding will propel Orkes to expand its offerings, including its new AI orchestration platform, simplifying the integration of complex generative AI-powered workflows into both existing and new applications. Additionally, the investment will further strengthen the Conductor open-source platform and community. Notably, Nexus Managing Director Abhishek Sharma will join the board at Orkes, underscoring the significance of this partnership. Based in California, Orkes provides an enterprise-grade, cloud-hosted version of the open-source microservice orchestration software called Conductor. Renowned companies like Atlassian, Tesla, and Oracle, alongside government entities such as the United Kingdom’s Ministry of Justice, trust Orkes' tailored offerings for sensitive use cases, deployment flexibility, and enterprise-grade security. CEO and Co-founder of Orkes, Jeu George, shared that revenue tripled in the past year, with a significant rise in logo growth, reflecting the growing demand for Orkes across AWS, GCP, and Azure deployments. Founded by Viren Baraiya, Boney Sekh, Jeu George, and Dilip Lukose, Orkes is revolutionizing application orchestration, leveraging their expertise honed at Netflix, Microsoft, and Amazon. Excited about the journey ahead as we continue to empower engineering teams to build exceptional applications with ease! #Orkes #FundingNews #ApplicationOrchestration #AIIntegration #TechInnovation

The Deep Tech Napkin is a framework developed by First Momentum Ventures for evaluating deep tech startups using five key factors: team, technology, market, business model, and impact. The full report has unique statistics about deep tech. Fore example, did you know that unit sales (one-time, non-recurring) are still the most common form of revenue vs IP licensing (50% of start-ups use unit sales!). Even more surprising only 30% have repeatable and “meaningful” revenue by Series A! For more interesting stories and updates like this one, consider subscribing to our weekly newsletter. https://lnkd.in/ebhkEBkM

Since not that many people are on bluesky, I shall repeat my skeets from #LALDN24 here - also so the people that I wrote about that see it :D Bare in mind that these are short posts writing while the speaker was speaking - if something is unclear, please ask me. The good thing is that there will be a video of each talk at the conference so you can see it for yourself :) The statements are those of the speaker Starting with the keynote of Pawel Brodzinski talking about developing better products. From the book Lean Startup, we learned how we use fancy words to give the illusion that we are developing great products. During the twenty years of Lunar Logic the one thing that run through all products: frustration! We created so many things that should not be developed. We added so much functionality that should not be developed. Too much unneeded functionality is developed. We also believe that our product(s) will survive even if 90% of products fail (made up number which is probably true). We have bias that OUR product is of course good. Just like 80% of drivers think they drive better than average! Also we only see the things that succeed. There are many many ideas who never make it to being a product and fewer who become successful products. When Microsoft Clippy came out, the first thing people did was figure out how to turn the feature off. Not a success Minimum viable products are never minimal, sometimes viable, and always a product. We need to challenge ideas and assumptions, get to the point where our questions make the creator of the idea “oh I did not think of that” - that is when we know we helped them think. Ending words: Do like the Spice Girls: ask “tell me what you want, what you really really want” If you want the illusion of control and not challenge status quo too much, be brick layers. If you want innovative products, try these things

What is the most valuable asset that a startup can have: Is it the product or service that we offer? In my opinion it’s the TEAM that we are building.  Products might fail. Services might change.  But the most valuable assets are the people who joined the journey, trusting the company’s vision and direction. AIqwip is growing very fast as an AI consulting and Saas business. Thanks to all those clients who have believed in our technical expertise and allowed us to grow with them. 

🚀 Big News: We’ve Raised $7.5M in Series A Funding! Securing funding without .ai in our domain name? Not the easiest task—as my co-founder, Tom, can surely attest! That’s why I’m beyond excited to announce a major milestone in our journey at Apideck: we’ve successfully closed our $7.5M Series A round! This funding propels us forward in our mission to revolutionize realtime Unified APIs and deliver even more value to our customers and partners. The round was led by Airbridge Equity Partners, with support from PMV and an amazing group of angel investors. 🌟 Why This Matters APIs power the connected world we live in—but integrating them has historically been a major pain point. At Apideck, we’ve set out to simplify API integrations for SaaS companies and Fintechs by creating a Unified API platform that standardizes integrations while prioritizing data security and removing customer liability. This approach has resonated with startups and high-growth companies, as well as industry leaders like Kintsugi, Setyl, Kadonation, Drata, 11x, BILL and Principal Group. 🧠 Looking Ahead: AI and the Future of Integrations We’re not just simplifying APIs—we’re embracing the next frontier of technology. We’re integrating large language models (LLMs) into our Unified APIs to enable real-time data processing and smarter, AI-powered solutions. We’re also developing API plugins for popular AI frameworks, giving businesses the ability to unlock real-time data for their AI-driven applications and agents. It’s an exciting leap forward, and we can’t wait to share more soon! 📈 What This Means for Apideck With this funding, we’ll expand our engineering, product, partnerships, and go-to-market teams to better support our customers and partners. We’re doubling down on our mission to help businesses build better, faster, and more secure integrations. 🙌 Thank You This milestone wouldn’t have been possible without our customers' trust, our team's dedication, and the support of our partners and investors. Together, we’re building a platform that’s changing how businesses approach integrations—one that puts data security, developer experience, and customer success at the core. Special thanks to our team and investors; Ritik, Nick, Kristof, Bernard, Geiser, Javier, Karnika, Samir, Willem, Jonas, Jingyi, Rick, Pepijn, Jan, amit, Jean-Bernard, Yves, Aadit, Christophe, Michiel, Christophe, Jens, Johan, Geoffroy, Gregory, Danny, Diederik, Benoît, Jeff, Quinten, Emile, Jake, Geert, Brahim, Peak and Tim and for being part of our journey. Here’s to the journey ahead! Read more about it in our blog https://lnkd.in/e2i4P6sP #funding #team #api #fintech #saas #betech

Sometimes, the only way forward is backward. 3 days ago, I had an intense experience while developing an AI-Powered prototype for Carbonetrix - a startup client. We were working on something exciting, But we hit a major roadblock with the Gemini API that kept delaying us. We wrestled with the issue for days, But somehow, each solution seemed to create 2 new problems. Finally, I called one of the developers. "I think I have a solution," I said. I could tell he was hoping for a breakthrough, as usual. "We need to tear everything down & rebuild from scratch." The silence was deafening, followed by a subtle "Ahh." So, we did it...Tore it down and rebuilt. With 2 days & 2 nights of intense focus & clarity … it worked! We had built a sleek, functional, beautiful prototype that did exactly what it was supposed to do. Sometimes, the best solutions aren’t about patching things up; they’re about having the courage to start over. Sometimes, you have to break it first. It's like that friend who tells you what you need to hear, not what you want to hear. Sure, it hurts at first, but they’re usually right. Because sometimes, ... backwards is forward way only the Confused? Read it backwards ♻ Pls kindly share if your audience will find this valuable. ___________ I'm Samuel (aka AI-Sam) Click my name + follow + 🔔 💡 I help Startups & Growing Companies build Powerful Prototypes & MVPs that customers will Love. ❤️ Shoot me a DM, let's chat.