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Dapper Labs, Flow, and NBA Top Shot

A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

Dapper Labs came out of an incubator called Axiom Zen back in 2017. But I am writing again as there is likely to be a bunch of chatter about Dapper, Flow, and NBA Top Shot as the news of a financing round comes out today. Financings don’t really interest me but companies do. And this is a fascinating company.

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Startup School for Future Founders

Y Combinator

We launched Startup School as an online program in 2017 to support founders actively working on building their companies. Finally, we’ve also been contacted by universities, incubators and entrepreneurship centers interested in incorporating Startup School content into their curriculum. You can register for the new course today.

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LA-based A-Frame, a developer of celebrity-led personal care brands, raises cash for its brand incubator

TechCrunch

Joining Initialized in the round is the serial entrepreneur Moise Emquies, whose previous clothing lines, Ella Moss and Splendid, were acquired by the fashion holding company VFC in 2017. A-Frame previously raised a seed round backed by cannabis dispensary Columbia Care. The company’s first product is a hand soap, Keeper. The Honest Co.

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OpenAI will give roughly 10 AI startups $1M each and early access to its systems

TechCrunch

Beyond Converge, surprisingly, there aren’t many incubator programs focused exclusively on AI startups. The Allen Institute for AI has a small accelerator that launched in 2017, which provides up to a $500,000 pre-seed investment and up to $450,000 in cloud compute credits.

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SmartRyde, a Japanese online platform for airport transfers, spurs global expansion with Series A

TechCrunch

Sota Kimura, co-founder and CEO of SmartRyde, founded SmartRyde in 2017 after he experienced trouble getting a taxi from the airport to the hotel when he traveled abroad, Kimura told TechCrunch. SmartRyde announced today it has secured a $1.6 It will also use the funding for global expansion, Kimura said.

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Unsung Hero Spotlight: Christina Theodoraki

Ecosystem Builder Hub

These can be policy makers, entrepreneurs, students, incubator managers and staff, universities, professors, educators and researchers, or just citizens. I also do research on incubators, as intermediaries between entrepreneurial and the ecosystem and how they decrease the gap between them. We are all connected to our ecosystem.

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Luxury fashion meets blockchain on Syky, the Seven Seven Six-backed web3 platform

TechCrunch

In 2017, Delahunt was at Ralph Lauren and had her first look at the blockchain, but it wasn’t until years later while working to pioneer some digital wardrobe projects with companies, like Snap, Bitmoji and Roblox, that she had an opportunity to see that web3 was going to be “more than a niche community” for luxury fashion. “I