Augment Ventures August 2020 Newsletter

“The venture capital (VC) world often follows the general trends of the markets. When social media is the in-thing, investors will flock to all manner of social media startups. The same goes for any area of investing from mobile apps to live-work-play co-working places and everything in between. So too is the investor perspective on artificial intelligence. When it became clear less than a decade ago that AI was the latest, hottest place to build companies that could grow from tiny startups to huge public market exits of acquisitions, the VC community got all in.In the past few years, it seemed that just the mere mention of AI in your product was attractive enough to raise substantial funding rounds. As a result, startups of all sorts played into this trend adding AI and ML jargon and buzzwords into business plans or marketing material and raising more money than ever. Yet, are these companies actually building solutions that the market is looking for and pushing AI forward, or are they simply ‘AI-washing’ their otherwise unintelligent offerings?”

Read the full article on Forbes here.

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It’s an understatement to say that no one could have properly forecasted how this year would unfold, and furthermore, how the fundraising marketplace would subsequently adapt. TechCrunch has been tracking key data metrics from the 2020 DocSend Startup Index and unsurprisingly, VC interest in new investments continues to grow.Read the full article here.

Across industries, verticals and stages, more than 1,300 VC companies received funding, including investments within healthcare, transportation and foodtech.Read the full article here.