Rex Salisbury, a former partner at Andreesen Horowitz, revealed that his solo firm, Cambrian Ventures, has secured $20M to fund pre-seed and seed fintech startups. The VC firm plans to invest up to $500,000 per startup. 

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• Salisbury expects to have invested the capital in 24 months.
• "The nice thing about being a solo capitalist is I can be very flexible, like working with founders starting off and who just want to raise a very small angel round and say ‘we don’t really want any larger institutions involved because we want the flexibility to ideate and pivot," Salisbury told TechCrunch.
• Cambian's LPs include founders from companies such as Betterment, Nerdwallet, Plaid, and SoFi, among others.
• Cambian participated in employee bonus platform Keep Financial's $9M seed round in May. Prior to that, the firm invested in R&D performance management platform FarCloud's ~$1.47M angel round.

Amazon aggregator Boosted Commerce cut its workforce by 5% but didn't reveal the exact number of employees that were let go. The layoffs primarily impacted members of Boosted Commerce's brand and marketing teams, and Business Insider notes that multiple employees at the "VP and director level" were also let go.

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• Boosted Commerce has raised $380M since its inception in 2019.
• The company didn't specify the reason for the layoffs but said it isn't struggling, noting it's acquired 40 brands in the past two years and is continuing to grow its portfolio.

Zoom out:

• Amazon aggregators raised $2B in H1, a 60% decline YoY.
• Venture funding has fallen for multiple reasons, including higher interest rates, concerns about the business model, and a slowdown in e-commerce sales growth.
• In recent months, multiple aggregators, including Thrasio (20%) and Suma Brands (42%), have laid off staff.

Struck Capital announced it is earmarking $15M for a venture studio to spin out companies. Struck is seeking to come up with ideas in-house, build MVPs, fund the companies, and then proceed with finding a CEO to co-found the startup.

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• Adam Struck told TechCrunch that his firm had trouble getting founders to allow them to do due diligence in 2021 and was seeing startups with a lot of technical and operational debt. 
• "We essentially do all the ideation, validation, and product development on our own. We feel we can do a great job of that just because we can flex the information asymmetries," Struck said.
• Prior to the startup studio fund, Struck Capital raised $30M for its fund in 2016 and $75M in Jan. 2020.
  • In July, the venture firm participated in a $25M round by Aquabite, which works on ML-enabled IoT for sustainable fish farming.

Over 25% of startups in the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region are "blockchain-related," according to a report by KPMG and HSBC. 1,130 of the 6,472 startups analyzed in the report were NFT-related, while 650 were focused on decentralized finance.

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• 32.8% of the 6,472 startups were based in China, while 30.1% were in India and 12.7% in Japan.
• APAC-based startups collectively raised $193.7B in 2021, up from $116.1B in 2020. 
• APAC-based startups have raised over $32.6B so far this year.
• The report is available here.

Trustless Media, a startup working on community-owned media, has launched out of stealth mode with a $3.25M seed round. Trustless plans for its content to be owned by owners of the startup's NFTs. 

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• "The whole concept is trying to figure out a way to break down a wall between content creators and the audience of the show they’re creating," said Trustless' co-founder Zach Guzman, who previously worked at Yahoo Finance and CNBC.
• The company plans to focus on crypto news stories. Guzman plans to host the site's flagship show. The startup plans to expand beyond crypto-focused shows in the future, to sectors that include food and travel.
• Trustless' first collection of 1,000 items, named Network NFT, is attempting to bring users to the site via referrals.
• The round was led by FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried, with participation from Ava Labs and Red DAO founder Megan Kaspar, among others.

Egyptian e-commerce marketplace The Fashion Kingdom (TFK) raised a $2.6M seed round at an undisclosed valuation. CEO Fadi Antaki revealed the company's total sales volume increased by 3x to an undisclosed amount between April 2021-April 2022. This is TFK's first funding round since its inception in 2020

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• Antaki says the number of brands on TFK's marketplace is rising by 10%-15% MoM to surpass 200.
• TFK's customer base is over 150,000.
• TFK's platform features products in multiple categories, including beauty and home accessories.

Zoom out:

• The Egyptian retail market is valued at $70B, while the country's e-commerce market is worth $4.2B.
• Earlier this week, Egyptian B2B marketplace Cartona raised $12M at an undisclosed valuation.

Quick Hits:

• When you align headless CMS with a modern DAM and analytics, you can serve personalized content that keeps people coming back.*
• Meta is reportedly considering acquiring eye-tracking glasses startup AdHawk. The social media company plans to integrate it into its mixed-reality headset.
• Former Amazon Alexa engineers launched UnWrap, a natural language processor for user feedback. The startup raised $3M after going through the Allen Institute for AI's incubator.
• Datch, a startup working on AI-powered voice assistants for industrial applications, raised a $10M Series A.
• Germany plans to earmark ~$30.4B for startups, prioritizing deep tech and climate solutions. 
• Super Coffee, the #3 ranked bottled coffee brand in the US behind Starbucks and Dunkin’, is replacing the negatives with only positive ingredients.*

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