wprss domain was triggered too early. This is usually an indicator for some code in the plugin or theme running too early. Translations should be loaded at the init action or later. Please see Debugging in WordPress for more information. (This message was added in version 6.7.0.) in /var/www/wp-includes/functions.php on line 6114wprss domain was triggered too early. This is usually an indicator for some code in the plugin or theme running too early. Translations should be loaded at the init action or later. Please see Debugging in WordPress for more information. (This message was added in version 6.7.0.) in /var/www/wp-includes/functions.php on line 6114wprss domain was triggered too early. This is usually an indicator for some code in the plugin or theme running too early. Translations should be loaded at the init action or later. Please see Debugging in WordPress for more information. (This message was added in version 6.7.0.) in /var/www/wp-includes/functions.php on line 6114wprss domain was triggered too early. This is usually an indicator for some code in the plugin or theme running too early. Translations should be loaded at the init action or later. Please see Debugging in WordPress for more information. (This message was added in version 6.7.0.) in /var/www/wp-includes/functions.php on line 6114wprss domain was triggered too early. This is usually an indicator for some code in the plugin or theme running too early. Translations should be loaded at the init action or later. Please see Debugging in WordPress for more information. (This message was added in version 6.7.0.) in /var/www/wp-includes/functions.php on line 6114Founders now have a way to ensure that their investors haven’t taken money from countries like China, Russia, Iran or Cuba.
Over 20 venture firms have signed the Clean Capital Certification, attesting that they have not and will not take money from foreign adversaries. Some of the firms that have signed include Marlinspike Partners, Humba Ventures, and Snowpoint Ventures. “We must ensure that US adversaries do not directly profit from our success, and publicly signing the Clean Capital Certification is a way to commit to that duty as a community,” Craig Cummings, partner at Moonshots Capital, said in a statement.
The pledge was created by Future Union, an advocacy organization that works on issues related to foreign interference in the private sector. The pledge declares that new technologies, in the wrong hands, can “cast a shadow of authoritarianism, misinformation, and division.”
Future Union’s executive director Andrew King has been working on the pledge for about three years, but he’s feared Chinese interference much longer. He recalled having long conversations with a friend at the Department of Defense about “how deleterious the China operation was in the US,” and how the country was “influencing venture capital and private equity — through money and other incentives — to get access to the critical technologies.”
King said that, if a firm has Chinese investors, then it’s possible that those investors — and then the Chinese government — could receive proprietary information about portfolio companies.
In the venture capital world, it’s mostly a hypothetical fear, but one that more and more people share. In September, the Financial Times reported that the FBI was investigating California-based venture capital firm Hone Capital for allegedly passing information along to its Chinese investors. And in February, a congressional committee report called out five U.S. investment firms for investing in Chinese companies, claiming these investments helped support China’s military and enabled the country’s human rights abuses.
Congressman John Moolenaar, chairman of the Select Committee on the CCP, applauded the pledge. “American national security and economic prosperity are put at risk when U.S. companies invest in our foremost adversary or welcome CCP-backed investors on their boards,” he said in a statement. “Instead, thanks to these patriotic investors, there will now be a standard for Clean Capital Certification that Americans can use to evaluate their investments.”
It’s not a coincidence that many of the firms on the list invest in defense tech startups. For defense companies, taking money that has ties to certain countries can jeopardize their ability to do business with the Department of Defense.
Of the roughly twenty firms that have signed the pledge, bigger funds that invest in defense are notably absent, like Andreessen Horowitz and Founders Fund. In general, neither firm signs open letters like the pledge, although a Founders Fund spokesperson did clarify that the firm does not take capital from any of the countries that the pledge covers. In the past, partner Delian Asparouhov has called firms that take Chinese capital “traitorous.”
Similarly, a16z partners Katherine Boyle and David Ulevitch penned a Wall Street Journal op-ed last year that made their stance clear. “While some American investors previously chased investments in adversarial countries such as China, it’s now clear they bet on the wrong government,” the pair wrote.
That may have been a not-so-subtle dig at one of a16z’s long-standing arch rivals, Sequoia, which famously had a large Chinese investment arm until it split that unit off into its own entity in mid 2023.
The pledge itself isn’t perfect: it’s a voluntary certification that has no formal vetting process to make sure the firms are true to their word. And even if a firm can attest that their limited partners aren’t based in China, the limited partners themselves might still take money from Chinese entities.
King emphasized that this pledge is a first step, and that future initiatives might include a third-party organization to vet the firm’s investors or another certification that looks into the limited partners themselves.
He’s hoping that even just a voluntary pledge will hold firms accountable. “The self attestation is public,” he said. “And there’s reputational risk and damage that could come from attesting and then your other limited partners or others finding out that it wasn’t the case.”
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Doug Schuessler has always been a founder. This passion, which has been with him since childhood, saw him launch two startups, move to San Francisco, and take a job at Square to see what a “real rocket shop looked like.” He later became chief revenue officer at restaurant booking platform Resy, before becoming a founder once again.
After Resy sold to AMEX, Schuessler said he started studying the hospitality technology industry more and found himself hooked on hotels.
“Independent hotels really need the help,” he told TechCrunch.
He said decades ago most of the hotels in the country were independently owned, but hotel chains have started to buy up these smaller properties, leaving the remaining independent hotels with more competition.
Schuessler and his co-founder, Cody Rose, who also worked at Resy, decided to create Safara, a business that lets customers book nearly every hotel in the world — whether it’s a chain or independent.
The list is curated from a mix of consumer data and community-sourced recommendations. There is also a rewards program, that provides cash back to those who book through the platform which can be applied to the next trip. Independent hotels using Safara can access it commission-free, though technically any hotel can plug into the platform.
“Think of it as another direct challenge alongside their website,” Schuessler continued. “We then connect these two products to elevate the guest experience by enabling direct web guests who book directly on the hotel’s site to manage that reservation in the Safara app.”
Today, Safara announces an undisclosed led by Sequoia and Defy.vc, as well as the acquisition of the company Skipper, an online booking engine used by independent hotels. With the additional funding, Safara has raised $14 million in funding to date.
The Safara and Skipper team came together after being introduced by a mutual investor who felt the companies had a similar outlook on the hospitality space. The Skipper co-founders will join Safara in some capacity.
“We actually made a pass at the deal earlier in the year,” Schuessler said. But the stars eventually aligned. “Both companies have a much better chance at achieving the shared vision together than they do apart.”
Safara aims to be different from others on the market by offering software solutions to hotels and products that serve the consumer on their side, too.
“The magic is going to come in 2025 when we connect these two products more deeply to create new experiences for both hotels and guests,” Schuessler, who is the company’s CEO, said.
Schuessler met his investors through warm introductions, he said. Alfred Lin, a partner at Sequoia, was the company’s first major believer but passed the first time around.
“I remember him saying, ‘Maybe we can become partners in the future,’ and at the time I thought that was BS, but it turned out to be the truth,” Schuessler said. He met Brian Rothenberg, a partner at Defy.vc, through the AngelTrack network, and said the two immediately hit it off.
“He is extremely supportive through good and bad and we tend to see the world through a very similar lens,” he continued.
Safara will use the fresh capital to scale product development and the number of hotels using its product.
“Our focus of 2025 and beyond is really to empower independent hotels with the same technology and network advances as chain hotels,” Schuessler said. “If we get this right, not only do we help these hotels succeed, but the types of experiences that will unlock for guests are things that frankly don’t exist right now. And if we accomplish both of those things, the sky is the limit for Safara as a company.”
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Just five months after announcing a new $100 million fund called Anthology Fund, Menlo Ventures and Anthropic have backed their first 18 startups. And they are looking for more.
Menlo says these first 18 were selected from thousands of applicants. They include startups working on recruiting software; autonomous coding; interpretability research (understanding how models make decisions); fintech compliance and tax apps; radiology image analysis and chart reviewing apps; non-human identity cybersecurity; customer engagement software; and a consumer nutrition app. Plus there are eight more accepted into the program that are still in stealth, Menlo says.
This program is something of a cross between a typical corporate startup program (like Nvidia’s Inception or Microsoft for Startups), where startups get usage credits and educational resources, and an incubator where they get company-building attention and investment. The fund will write checks of $100,000 or more into startups — from pre-seed to Series B — and provide them with $25,000 worth of credits for Anthropic’s models.
Menlo is a major backer of Anthropic, and this fund helps both get in the middle of the next big thing for AI coming in 2025: a focus beyond the foundational models and AI infrastructure and into the new apps that run on top of them.
“We’re one of the biggest investors in Anthropic and huge fans of what they’re doing,” Menlo Ventures partner Tim Tully told TechCrunch in July when the program launched. “We thought this was an opportunity for us to do something together, where we can see the ecosystem and find great companies that are building on Anthropic or AI more broadly.”
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Successful tech companies follow a typical pattern: from product to platform where other startups build businesses on top of theirs. To spur that, they often launch a fund. In this case, someone else is launching a fund to help fast-growing social media site Bluesky, which now claims 25 million users.
On Wednesday, open source and Python bigwig Peter Wang announced the fund, dubbed Skyseed, with an initial $1 million war chest. Bluesky is the decentralized social app from Jack Dorsey (though Dorsey left the Bluesky board in May). It launched five years ago and has taken off as an alternative to Elon Musk’s X.
The fund will offer grants to those building on Bluesky’s open source AT Protocol. It’s looking for tech like data privacy controls for AI usage and apps for parents/children and local communities.
Correction: Bluesky says that this fund is independent of the company. This story has been updated to reflect that information.
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