Lore Machine: Transforming Stories with AI Graphic Novels
Kia Ora friends!
SVB Update
Much of the last 48 hours have been about the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and its knock-on effect on the startup ecosystem. We wanted to let you know that while we have historically used SVB for making capital calls, we don’t have any meaningful balances there as we have continued to deploy capital. As of now we have only USD 63,000 in SVB, which is all available under the FDIC guarantee. We are in the process of opening another bank account but can also use our Wise account for making future capital calls. We have an account with Bank of America Merrill Lynch for the management LLC which can be used in emergency to receive funds.
In terms of our portfolio companies, only 4 out of our 35 startups had accounts with SVB, and they all have full access to their capital regardless as of March 13th. We are proactively helping these startups open other bank accounts.
Startup of the month: KiwiFibre
We have three startup investments in the AI segment: Arcanum, DeckRobot, and Humata (previously TildaMail) and we have been looking to add more exposure to this fast growing area. Since the launch of ChatGPT in November ‘22, Generative AI space has seen huge technological acceleration and investor demand. We are excited to announce our first investment in the Generative AI space with Lore Machine, a US based startup with deep connections to media companies. Lore Machine uses Generative AI (think MidJourney, Stability, GPT) to turn written stories into AI generated graphic novels. There is so much content from works of fiction to movie scripts sitting catching dust that can be brought to life using this technology. See an example of a graphic novel they created: https://www.loremachine.ai/mariner.
We invested in Lore because they have found a very specific use case for this powerful tech which is the domain expertise of their founder Thobey Campion. Thobey was with Vice media for 17y and brings some important connections to media businesses along with his co-founder Nick Adler who was Snoop's manager for 20y. With our partner Glen Anderson’s expertise in AI we had the edge in evaluating and picking this opportunity from amongst several others we have come across.
Lore is seeing strong demand for their product with 7 jobs ongoing and 141 in the pipeline. Key is to monetize them in a scalable way with higher degree of automation via prompt engineering; the round is focused on bringing more NLP tech expertise in house. At USD 15M post-money we found this to be a reasonable valuation for this explosive domain. We think they can scale this quickly into a profitable business given the impending demand. Thobey has some very cool projects in the pipeline, including a graphic novel on the sequel to movie Heat.
They still have some room left in the $3M round and we are happy to introduce our LP’s to Thobey for co-investments. Please reply to this email if you are interested.
Best regards,
Mark Pavlyukovskyy, Ajay Gupta, and Glen Anderson