Unshackled Ventures is the only early-stage venture capital fund that enables unrecognized and excluded immigrant founders to start companies in the U.S. Since its founding in 2014, Unshackled has proven its thesis that investing and supporting this population drives strong investment returns across key industries, including American infrastructure, generative AI, healthcare, space, and enterprise SaaS. To date, the firm has invested in 80 companies and over 200 entrepreneurs.

Unshackled Ventures

PEER Venture Partners is a venture capital firm that invests in and works with entrepreneurs to build outstanding enterprises.

Peer Venture Partners

Lateral Capital is a mission driven venture fund investing in early and growth stage opportunities in Africa. We back companies that provide foundational technologies for the continent. We make debt and equity investments technology-enabled businesses that profitably solve significant pain points across financial services, healthcare, education, energy, agriculture, housing, logistics, mobility and more.

Lateral Frontiers

DecentraNet is an early-stage venture investment fund and advisory firm. They focus on blockchain and social impact, next-generation therapeutics, and space technology.

DecentraNet

GSR has nine years of deep crypto market expertise as a market maker, ecosystem partner and active, multi-stage investor. GSR sources and provides spot and non-linear liquidity in digital assets for token issuers, institutional investors, miners, and leading cryptocurrency exchanges. GSR employs over 300 people around the globe, and its trading technology is connected to 60 trading venues, including the world's leading DEXs.  We have a culture of approaching complex problems with tenacity and imagination. We build long-term relationships by offering exceptional service, expertise and trading capabilities tailored to the specific needs of our clients.

Intersect VC is an investment firm that invests at early and later-stage companies. The firm also invests in mid-stage technology companies (Series A-C) in CPG / DTC, marketplaces/platforms, FinTech, and B2B software. They enjoy working with companies that have large potential markets, that can be applied across sectors including media, entertainment, fashion, health/wellness, and sports.

Intersect VC

Flori is an impact web3 seed-stage venture fund supporting a more inclusive financial system.  We want to accelerate those who believe that a new financial system built on blockchain technologies can be vastly more inclusive than the one we have today, and who are committed to making that vision a reality.

Flori Ventures

Alves Ventures operates as a venture capital firm. Alves Ventures don't just provide capital to bootstrap our portfolio projects, we actively work with them to empower them to realize their vision.

Alves Ventures

Four Cities Capital is a global seed and series A investor. It feels strongly that the impact of technology and software on the global economy remains in its early stages. Major global industries and significant portions of humanity remain structurally unaffected by the digital revolution and the recent emergence of massively disruptive technologies based on biology, new materials, and artificial intelligence/unmanned systems.

Four Cities Capital

Anagram is a venture capital fund committed to blockchain technology and the digitization of all assets. Anagram's goal is to advance blockchain technology so that it can: encourage communities and people to participate in the ownership economy; hasten the financialization and digitization of everything; and enable everyone to take part in the ecosystem of digital assets.

Anagram

Digital Currency Group builds and supports bitcoin and blockchain companies by leveraging insights, network, and access to capital. Based in Stamford, Connecticut, DCG has been an active seed investor in the digital currency industry with 150+ investments in over 30 countries. In addition, DCG owns and operates CoinDesk, the top media and events platform in the blockchain space, Genesis Trading, the industry's leading bitcoin brokerage firm, and Grayscale Investments, the largest digital currency asset management firm.

Digital Currency Group

Inception Capital, formerly OP Crypto, is a first-check VC focusing on early-stage web3 startups. Since raising $50M in September 2021, we have been at the forefront of the industry, investing at the earliest stage in over 30 projects such as Scroll Tech, Merit Circle, Avalanche, Celestia. Backed by esteemed investors like Bill Ackman, Alan Howard, and Garry Tan, and institutions including Galaxy Digital, Animoca Brands, and Mirana, Inception Capital boasts an extensive, global network. This network spans venture funds, exchanges, expert advisors, and major ecosystem founders (Solana, Avalanche, Polygon, Scroll, et cetera), enabling us to source and secure the most competitive deals in the market. Our team, rooted in the United States yet deeply connected to the APAC region, positions Inception Capital as a vital conduit between East and West. This unique positioning allows us to offer our portfolio companies more than just capital. With a dedicated team providing portfolio support, we assist our founders in key areas such as marketing, tokenomics, and strategic networking, ensuring they have the tools and guidance necessary to thrive in an ever-evolving landscape. Discover more about Inception Capital and how we are shaping the future of crypto venture capital: Visit our website: https://www.inception.capital/ Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/_inceptioncap

Inception Capital

We are an English language internet-based News & Company. We provide news and articles from all around the crypto industry. We publish Crypto News, NFT News, Bitcoin News, Altcoin News, and so on.  The purpose of our company is to make blockchain and cryptocurrency easy to understand for Crypto enthusiasts.

The Crypto Times

Blizzard Fund is a venture capital fund managed by AVA Labs and targets cryptocurrency industries.

Blizzard Fund

PEER is a venture capital firm focused on early-stage opportunities in peer-to-peer assets, marketplaces, and technology.

Peer Ventures

Masa

Masa is a decentralized data marketplace developer where users get compensated for their data contribution. It seeks to disrupt traditional centralized credit infrastructure and consists of a non-fungible credit report, composable credit primitives, smart contracts, and liquidity pools, that address the need for a scalable, interoperable, and standardized on-chain identity infrastructure for the evolving web3 ecosystem.

Masa provides a decentralized data marketplace that enables users to contribute their personal data and receive compensation through Masa's native token, MASA. User data is preserved using zero-knowledge proofs. Developers can use this data for training AI models and creating applications that preserve user privacy as well as other Web3 applications. The product was in development as of February 2024.

The toolkit to build machine learning applications at scale

Machine Learning Infrastructure

Securian Financial partners with MASA

Masa provides a decentralized data marketplace that enables users to contribute their personal data and receive compensation through Masa's native token, MASA. User data is preserved using zero-knowledge proofs. Developers can use this data for training AI models and creating applications that preserve user privacy as well as other Web3 applications. The product was in development as of February 2024.The company offers Masa Analytics, a privacy-preserving, cookieless Web3 analytics tool that understands user behavior and segments them. This allows Web3 dApp developers to enhance products to meet the needs of users and implement curated marketing campaigns. It also offers Masa Growth, which allows companies to incentivize marketing campaigns to improve product usage, grow social channels, and track and analyze data of verified users using Masa Analytics.Key customers and partnershipsAs of January 2024, more than 1 million wallets were connected to Masa Network over 23,000 testnet node operators.Funding and financialsIn January 2024, the company raised USD 5.4 million in <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/25843">seed funding</a> led by Anagram, with participation from Avalanche Blizzard Fund, Digital Currency Group, and GoldenTree, among others. The new capital will be used to launch Masa's mainnet on a dedicated Avalanche subnet in Q1 2024.

Datagen provides a self-service synthetic data platform that generates visual synthetic data of humans for computer vision applications. The platform allows users to write their own code to generate labeled synthetic data for faces, full body, and humans in motion in the form of images and videos to test and train AI models while retaining complete control over the data. The data covers a range of computer vision tasks including face landmark detection, face and hair segmentation, facial recognition and identification, full body pose estimation, full body segmentation, and behavior detection.Key customers and partnershipsThe company serves three of the top five global technology companies and Fortune 500 companies across the automotive, smart fitness, AR/VR/metaverse, smart office, and home security industries. Its notable customers include Google, Toyota, NVIDIA, IBM, and Intel.Funding and financialsIn March 2022, the company raised USD 50 million in a Series B funding round led by Scale Venture Partners. The funds were utilized to bolster its position in the market.Datagen reported to have recorded 8x growth in revenue in 2022.

Datagen

Weights &amp; Biases offers a platform that allows users to build models with experiment tracking, data set and model versioning, data visualization, hyperparameter optimization, and model management. The platform enables users to automatically retrain and re-evaluate models and centrally manage all model versions through every lifecycle stage—from development to staging to production. It also helps to visualize comparisons between model versions to evaluate performance and identify regressions before model deployment. It also offers toolkits such as <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/19172">W&amp;B Weave and W&amp;B Production Monitoring </a>to build and monitor data- and ML-powered applications, respectively, through interactive visualizations.The company also offers a <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/17880">suite of tools (W&amp;B Prompts) </a>to support large language model operations (LLMOps). W&amp;B Prompts includes tools and features for experiment tracking, debugging, and collaboration, as well as a one-click method to evaluate and score prompts through the OpenAI Eval’s framework.The company provides the platform through a free tier and under a subscription model for up to USD 50 per user per month.Key customers and partnershipsWeights &amp; Biases served more than 700,000 ML practitioners as of August 2023. Its notable include NVIDIA, Toyota, BMW Group, Samsung, Fujifilm, Truebill, and Clear Capital.The company has <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/18663">partnered with Lambda </a>, a GPU cloud computing provider, to offer its MLOps platform integrated with the infrastructure services of the latter, catering to enterprises dealing with AI and deep-learning workloads.Funding and financialsIn August 2023, the company raised <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/20874">USD 50 million in a strategic investment </a>round at a valuation of USD 1.25 billion, led by Daniel Gross and Nat Friedman. The round also saw participation from Sapphire Ventures, Coatue, Insight Partners, and other investors. The company aimed to utilize the fresh funds to further develop its ML tools, including the launch of W&amp;B Prompts.

Weights & Biases

BentoML offers an open-source platform called Bento Cloud, for the deployment and scaling of AI applications. It is a fully managed platform that handles the complexities of AI infrastructure, providing serverless autoscaling as required during the development and production stages. The platform helps to ship models to production with advanced deployment options including online and shadow A/B testing, while also providing visibility through model performance monitoring. The platform integrates with an organization’s existing data stack and enables users to continuously deploy and improve models in production. The company offers its platform through a combination of subscription and usage-based model.In addition, BentoML also provides the following open-source platforms: 1) Yatai, for model deployment on Kubernetes and 2) bentoctl, for model deployment on any cloud platform.Key customers and partnershipsAs of January 2024, BentoML reported that over 1,000 organizations, comprising more than 3,000 members, use its platform. Its notable customers include Koo, Open Layer, Line, and Naver.The company entered into a strategic partnership with TomTom, a developer of location technology, to help integrate with various models as well as in LLM deployments.Funding and financialsThe company raised <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/19684">USD 9 million in seed funding </a>in June 2023 led by DCM Ventures, with participation from Bow Capital. It aimed to channel the newly acquired funds to enhance its platform and offer developers a range of tools for building, deploying, and scaling AI applications efficiently.

BentoML

Iguazio provides a serverless platform based on its open-source Nuclio framework that helps users to develop, deploy, and manage real-time AI applications without requiring them to manually manage underlying infrastructures such as servers and storage. The platform creates real-time intelligence for applications located at the edge, public cloud, and on-premise data centers and reduces bandwidth constraints by consolidating data into a repository and making it available for applications as required. The platform can ingest and transform data from any source, which is then used to train, evaluate, deploy, and monitor models in production.The company leverages Big Data and ML software such as Apache Spark, TensorFlow, and Kubernetes to manage software containers that enable applications to run across different computing environments.Key customers and partnershipsIguazio serves customers in the financial services, telecommunications, smart mobility, manufacturing, retail, AdTech, gaming, healthcare, energy, and utilities sectors. Notable customers include Samsung, Microsoft, NVIDIA, AWS, Google, and Intel.Funding and financialsIn January 2020, the company raised USD 24 million in a funding round led by INCapital Ventures. The funds were utilized to accelerate its growth, expand its reach into new global markets, grow sales, and facilitate new sales channels that include companies such as Dell Technologies

Iguazio

Cogito Tech provides image and video annotation to generate computer vision training data sets for ML &amp; deep learning (DL). The video annotation solution leverages AI-powered tools to convert video into a sequence of images and generates training data sets for ML-based AI models, including self-driving cars and drones. The AI model understands and derives insights from visual data to detect, identify, classify, and track objects in an image or video. Cogito also provides virtual assistants and chatbots to help users in the process of training ML algorithms. Cogito Tech also provides high-quality, ethically sourced datasets that are compliant and reliable to train ML models.In addition, the company provides services to fine-tune LLMs and GenAI applications through reinforcement learning techniques as well as stress test models through red teaming.Key customers and partnershipsAs of December 2022, the company served more than 150 customers across 25 countries in the retail, medical, automotive, agriculture, robotics, smart cities, security, and manufacturing industries. Notable customers includes Verizon Media, The University of Sydney, National Geographic, Tumblr, and Vimeo.

Cogito Tech

Platforms and frameworks that help developers build and train ML models.

Platforms that deploy and host the trained and tested models in production and integrate them into applications through APIs.

Platforms that generate artificial data that mimics the characteristics of real data, which is then used to train ML models at scale.

Platforms that help monitor and manage ML models in training and deployment to track performance, conduct variance analysis, and optimize performance.

Makers of hardware such as CPUs, GPUs, and other application-specific hardware required to train and run ML workloads.

Integrated solutions that handle the end-to-end processes of developing, training, deploying, and monitoring ML models.

Data exchange providers and platforms that offer data labeling services via manual and/or software methods, which are used as input to train ML models.

Includes companies that provide infrastructure to build AI/ML applications

Provides tools to build, monitor, and deploy GenAI applications

Industry is focused on offering platforms for other businesses to build AI-/ML-powered apps

ANALYST_QUICK_TAKE

<div>
 
 Masa Network, a decentralized data marketplace, raised USD 5.4 million in a seed funding round. Anagram led the round, with Avalanche Blizzard Fund, Digital Currency Group, and GoldenTree participating. Masa's total funding now stands at USD 9.2 million. The funds will be used to launch Masa's mainnet on a dedicated Avalanche subnet in Q1, designed to handle large volumes of zero-knowledge encrypted data.
 Founded in 2021, Masa enables users to contribute personal data and get compensated through its native token. This data is then used by developers for training AI models and building privacy-preserving applications.
 
</div> Analyst QuickTake: Masa's funding round coincides with Bagel Network's announcement of securing USD 3.1 million in pre-seed funding for the development of a decentralized data marketplace.

Masa

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