Wispr AI, Bit.io, Ask-AI, ModeMagic— 1st November, 2022

Nicolas von Blottnitz
4 min readNov 2, 2022

We see about 5,000 startups each week, and I want to give you a glimpse into how we at Headline think about trending tech companies and tracking new investment opportunities. In this post, I’m highlighting top tech companies that have announced or raised a seed round within the past week.

Wispr AI

EVA Growth Index:
No external sources showing growth

Product:
AI-enabled voice interface infrastructure for a next-gen tech user experience

Lead Investors:
New Enterprise Associates, 8VC

Total Raised:
$14.6M

Comparables:
Speechly

My Thoughts:
It seems inevitable that the way we interact with technology will increasingly move to voice over the coming decade, and Wispr has put together an incredible team to make that happen — a killer Seed syndicate for this round as well.

Bit.io

EVA Growth Index:

Product:
Developer solution that lets anyone launch and manage Postgres database swith a few lines of code

Lead Investors:
Battery Ventures, GreatPoint Ventures

Total Raised:
Undisclosed

Comparables:
ScaleGrid, Atlas

My Thoughts:
I have written about this many times, creating and managing databases is still far too difficult in this era of technology, and Bit is set out to solve just that. Their community-led approach should also enable them to build a real long-term moat.

Ask-AI

EVA Growth Index:
No external sources showing growth

Product:
Software that makes text-heavy company knowledge available in concise answers and actionable insights

Lead Investors:
State of Mind Ventures, Vertex Ventures Israel

Total Raised:
$9M

Comparables:
Notion, Outline

My Thoughts:
I love the idea of creating an accessible and digestible interface to the endless amount of knowledge that might exist within an organization. Access control to knowledge seems like an interesting solution to integrate here as well.

ModeMagic

EVA Growth Index:

Product:
AI-enable Shopify merchandise management solution to drive

Lead Investors:
Accel, Lightspeed, Ideaspring & Mana Angels.

Total Raised:
$7.5M

Comparables:
Entaice, Klevu

My Thoughts:
This is still a highly manual task for most and even at-scale Shopify sites. If Mason has the conversion numbers to show that their product is superior to what a human can do, this should be a no-brainer solution for the almost four million Shopify sites out in this world.

Hi, I am Nicolas von Blottnitz, an Associate at Headline’s SF office focusing on Consumer, Fintech, and SaaS businesses. Since joining in 2018, I have led our investments in Tabnine, Polygon, Flockjay, Solid, and Grin.

What is the EVA Growth Index?
The EVA Growth index is a composite of third-party data sources around a company’s website traffic. The vertical green lines in the charts represent a point in time where the company raised outside capital.

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Nicolas von Blottnitz

Early-stage venture capitalist at the global venture firm Headline and passionate surfer.