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$500M Isn't Enough to be Successful in Venture

$500M Isn't Enough to be Successful in Venture

Christopher Webster
February 07, 2025

Startups:

Virtual gym class:

Hiveclass is a New York-based edtech platform that hosts online courses for K-12 students to learn about fitness, sports, dance, yoga, nutrition, and other health and fitness related subjects. The idea for the company came from the concern on how to keep children’s active during the Covid-19 pandemic. Even after the pandemic a lot of parents are still concerned for a multitude of reasons like kids skipping PE classes and parents not being able to afford youth sports. This has caught the eyes of some investors. That is why Hiveclass just raised a seed round of $1.5 million. The recent round was led by Spring Mountain Capital. Other investors in the round included Georgetown Angel Investor Network (GAIN), New York State Venture Fund, Rethink Education, and Techstars. The funding brings the startup’s total capital raised to over $3 million altogether. Will kids start to take PE classes online now instead of in person?

Lab grown meat selling as dog treats:

Lab grown doggie snacks have gone on sale at a U.K. pet food retailer, Pets at Home. The retailer also happens to be a major investor in Meatly, the startup producing the meat ingredient contained in dog food brand The Pack’s Chick Bites, as slaughter-free, low-carbon treats. Meatly is claiming a world-first for retailing cultivated meat for pet food. The company gained regulatory clearance for the use case last summer. Chick Bites are first to commercialize meat that’s grown in bioreactors. They harvest cells from a single chicken egg for the entire process. Although this is still very early stage will we start seeing a whole isle of lab-grown meat treats for dogs soon?

Venture:

Is $500M even enough for a venture fund?:

Cherry Ventures is a Berlin-based venture capital firm that just raised a $500 million fund. They invest in early stage rounds as well as follow-on rounds at Series B and beyond. Some argue that the $500 million they raised isn’t even close to enough to be able to compete. They argue this because many American venture firms raise funds in the billions. There is a strong argument for this. The startup scene in Europe is also just much different than it is in Europe. There are more regulations in Europe which makes it harder for European startups to move fast which also limits how many startups European VCs can back. The lack of startups also means a lack of investment opportunities for European VCs to make. For example, European AI companies raised $8 billion last year while American AI companies raised $97 billion. That leaves the question, will European VCs be able to compete against their American counterparts?

Big Tech:

OpenAI drama continues:

Most of the executive team that started at OpenAI has left for many undisclosed reasons. This also includes OpenAI’s co-founder John Schulman, who left OpenAI and joined competitor Anthropic. However, John left Anthropic last week and is joining former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati. Mira has be working on her very secretive startup. There hasn’t been much leaked about Mira’s startup other than she has been trying to recruit other ex-OpenAI staff and that she’s in talks to raise $100 million. When will we learn what Mira is working on?