📶 The Q2 state of startups

7 charts to explain the state of startups, AI-powered legal tech gets a boost, and why OpenAI could lose $5b this year

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We have a lot to cover today - plenty of headlines, links, recs, and three Founders Fund portfolio companies that have raised sub-$3m.

Let’s jump right into it.

TL;DR:

HEADLINES
The state of startups (Q2 2024) ℹ️

  • The Q2 State Of Startups In 7 Charts (Crunchbase)

  • Midyear Forecast: Top Trends To Watch In H2 2024 — From Chips To AI Funds (Crunchbase)

  • AI-powered legal-tech startups cut the hype, gain more traction (Pitchbook)

  • Private Secondary Market Rises 58% as Deal Buildup Finally Breaks (WSJ)

  • Why OpenAI Could Lose $5 Billion This Year (The Information)

  • Tesla Reports 45% Drop in Second-Quarter Profit (The Information)

  • Alphabet to invest another $5B into Waymo (TechCrunch)

  • CrowdStrike offers a $10 apology gift card to say sorry for outage (TechCrunch)

  • Vanta raises $150M Series C, now valued at $2.45B (TechCrunch)

  • Alphabet’s M&A flops underscore its strategic dilemma (FT)

  • CalPERS’ climate-crisis pitch deck (Pitchbook)

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FUNDS

Name

Fund Size

Fund Number

Kingswood

$1.5b

III

Menlo Ventures

$100m

I

Graham Partners

$1.8b

VI

DFJ Growth

$1m

V

Trill Impact

$98.217m

I

Alliance Consumer Growth

$160m

V

P.S. 👉 If you’re looking to get a new VC job … 

We’ve found the best way to do that is to find the jobs before they become available. In our opinion, the best way to do that is to a) find who is raising funds and b) find who is the right person to contact at each of those funds.

STARTUPS (Together with Harmonic)
Founders Fund portfolio companies that have raised under $3m 🔎

Name

Description

📶 Punchcard

The starting point for any revenue question

🛳 inspeq iq

Ship AI apps you are proud of

🪞 The Mirror

The open-source Roblox & UEFN alternative

We use Harmonic to get thousands of data points on companies like these. 

RECS

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POLL

Will Q3 global funding be higher or lower than Q2?

Global funding was $79b in Q2 (a 16% QoQ change)

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RESULTS

Here are the results from our poll question in yesterday’s piece:

Are you currently training internal AI models?

 

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 Yep - with internal data from our firm (56)

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 Yep - but with external data from somewhere else (56)

🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️ Nope - not yet (43)

155 Votes

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