18 year old friends raise USD 500k for AI Startup, Hyundai Motor to launch IPO in India, Paywatch raises Series A funding, Prosus writes of Byju's, Black Semiconductor raises €254.4mn

Funding - June 2024 Newsletter Issue # 4

[1] Hyundai Motor to sell up to 17.5% of its wholly-owned subsidiary for as much as $3 billion in what seems likely to be India’s largest-ever IPO. For Hyundai Motor, India is a strategic growth market accounting for about 15% of its retail unit sales.

[2] Malaysia-based earned-wage access (EWA) service provider Paywatch has raised US$30 million in a Series A funding round from a mix of equity and credit facilities. The equity round of US$14 million was led by returning investor Third Prime and a consortium of US investors, including Vanderbilt University and the University of Illinois Foundation.

[3] Two 18-year-old best friends Christopher Fitzgerald and Nicholas Van Landschoot who recently graduated from high school have raised $500,000 pre-seed investment from Varana Capital for their AI startup APIGen. APIGen is working on a platform that will build custom APIs from natural language prompts. It will allow business to simply ask for an API that connects its web front end to its database, and the platform will deliver the code.

[4] Major investor Prosus has written off the worth of its 9.6% stake in edtech firm Byju’s to zero, signaling a loss of confidence in the once-most valued Indian startup. Prosus, the largest external investor in Byju’s, wrote off the startup “due to the significant decrease in value for equity investors “ .

[5] Amid a global race for semiconductor leadership, an Aachen-based startup Black Semiconductor has raised €254.4mn for its chip technology in a big boost for the German as well as the European semiconductor sector.The startup is developing a new type of chip-connecting technology using graphene, a novel material discovered in 2010 by Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov.