Quick news №33

What was perceived in the public field as a reason for wit on Twitter yesterday is gaining momentum today. We are talking about the metaverse, the status of which is being sought by various digital corporations. Seeing this trend, the head of Nvidia and several of his co-authors applied for a patent in August: they want to secure the authorship of the technology for opening and sharing files in the metaverse. Recently, the application was published, and from it you can learn that all work with the file will take place in the cloud without additional installation of applications and services on local devices.

We will not go far from technology. Five months ago, a ban was issued on any operations with cryptocurrencies in China, and at the same time the bitcoin hash rate fell by 50% —  the share of local miners accounted for almost half of the operations for calculating this currency. They were not taken aback and moved the equipment to neighboring countries, someone stayed at home and continued to mine outside the law, but most importantly, after almost six months, Bitcoin mining again uses the usual computing power.

Two platforms decided last week to embrace decentralization technology. Service for attracting crowdfunding Kickstarter announced that it plans to introduce blockchain into its system. According to the idea of ​​the platform, donations can be exchanged for tokens, and they, if the sponsored project is successful, will rise in price. The protocol is currently being developed, but when it will come into force is still unknown.

But WhatsApp has worked with the Novi crypto wallet in order to introduce the possibility of transactions in the crypt into the messenger. For now, we are talking about US users and USDP stablecoin transfers. Both WhatsApp and Novi are part of Meta. The former Facebook corporation launched its own crypto wallet in October this year.

Another corporation, Apple, raised its historic bar: for the first time, the company reached a capitalization above $3T. A few days ago, according to Nasdaq trading data, Apple exceeded this figure, and the company's shares rose in price to $176.54 per share — which is also a record. The Apple corporation broke its last record, $2T, in a little more than a year.

Other broken records come from the venture capital industry. A fresh study by the Venture Barometer came out, from which we learned that the number of business angels has grown in Russia. By the way, this year in the local venture capital market, it was private players that became the main reason for its growth, and not corporations or the public sector. The full text of the report can be found here. 

In general, we have a week of big numbers. For example, according to sources from the Financial Times, a startup of Russian founders Miro is about to raise a round led by Iconiq Capital: we are talking about $400M with an estimate of $17B. We are waiting and watching!

Two more startups announced the funds raised last week. The Show4me music platform of the founder from Ukraine raised $15M —  it is known that from a German investment company, its name is unknown. The project works as a social network of interaction between musicians and their fanbase, allowing them to form a community and earn money for authors of audio content. 

Baring Vostok has invested in the Russian marketing automation platform Mindbox, becoming its minority shareholder. In general, the startup was launched 15 (!) years ago, in 2006, but all this time it existed without external investment. The first attracted round will allow the cloud marketing automation platform to launch new products, develop existing ones, and also direct some of the funds to mergers and acquisitions. 

And the last two deals that caught our attention this week. First, the Belarusian stress management service Moodmate raised $200,000. The round was attended by Mikita Mikado, co-founder of PandaDoc, CEO of Appodeal Pavel Golubev and Ukrainian venture fund Digital Future, which acted as a lead investor. And the Russian MedTech-startup Checkme raised funding in the amount of $714,000 with an estimate of $5M. Interesting areas of development for which the raised funds will be spent are medical tourism and the development of check-ups for children and the elderly.

Have a productive week!