Quick News #7

With a new fund! Andrey Krivenko, the founder of VkusVill, is launching TealTech-2 fund of ₽10B together with partners. Among the interesting things: no one will charge a management fee, which is usually 2%. But the “success fee” will be 50% versus the usual 10–20%. The fund has a 10-year term and is the “sequel” to the TealTech fund, which has managed 43 deals in 4 years — most of them at the pre-seed stage.

The American magazine Inc. has published the list of Best Workplaces 2021. In the ranking, experts analyzed 24 sectors, including technology companies. Among 429 were selected companies that created the best opportunities for their employees during the pandemic. Among the list are Belarusian startup PandaDoc, Ukrainian companies Grammarly and GitLab, and a service “with Russian roots” Miro. Congratulations!

The week was rich in exciting and major rounds. For example, startup Neiry raised an investment of over ₽500M. External investors and the NTI Foundation participated in the round. The neural interfaces being developed by the company’s specialists allow not only to determine the level of a person’s cognitive resources but also to use computers with the help of the brain.

Another project, already from Latvia, Vinted has raised $303M. It is an online second-hand company already valued at $4.5B, which is 4 times more than two years ago. The culprit behind this investor interest is the circular economy, in which consumers are both suppliers and buyers of goods and services. It has become a popular way of buying and selling things in the last year of insularity. It is another area that has received a boost during the pandemic.

NFT tokens continue to storm the news reports. Speaking of the way they are sold, last week they were joined by eBay. The platform has allowed to sell and buy NFT tokens, but not to everyone, only sellers who meet “eBay standards”. In parallel, NFTb, the NFT-marketplace with a founder from Ukraine, about whose previous round we told in one of the Quick News, announced a new series of financing. The investor was a fund from major cryptocurrency exchange Binance, but neither side is disclosing the fact of the deal or its details. And lest we forget how promising this market is, a new batch of CryptoPunks characters was sold for just under $17M at a Christie’s auction.

Do you remember the Clubhouse? A little over a week ago the Android app version was released, so far only for the US. The company has promised to scale the version to other countries soon. Time will tell whether this will help the app which has been losing performance for a few months now.

And what we can already say for sure is that the EMERGE conference has ended. As a result, a syndicate of Angels Band investors is funding two projects: pet service ZENOO and AI content generator Copymonkey.ai. Congratulations to the teams!

Have a productive week!