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Sourced Edition 2

Sourced Edition 2

Bi-Weekly Report of Data Driven Sourcing & Screening - New Stealth Founders, Fintech Signals, Synthetic Data Competitors

Gabriel Shin
May 16, 2024

Welcome to Sourced, from your friends at Landscape 🏔️

As a reminder, Sourced is a data driven newsletter for early stage startup investors. All of the intelligence in this newsletter was gathered using Landscape, our new platform for investors looking to become more data driven.

Interested in learning more about Landscape? 🗓️ Book a Demo

🥷🏽 Fresh Stealth Founders

Landscape automatically monitors every founder entering stealth mode. There are currently 19.9k founders in stealth - are you tracking them?

Here are some interesting profiles we discovered recently 👇

Stealth

Founder: Daniel J. Mankowitz

Stealth since May 2024

Geography: UK

Background: 2x founder. He worked research scientist team at Google Deepmind. Before that he was the co-founder of Fitterli - using 3D cameras to track your body figure for diet, fitness and retail shopping. He’s also worked in robotics and computer vision algorithm developer for DARPA. He’s received his PhD in Reinforcement learning.

Stealth

Founder: Divesh Punjabi

Stealth since April 2024

Geography: US

Background: Divesh was the Entrepreneur in Residence and summer associate while achieving his MBA at Bessemer Capital. He’s worked in consulting at McKinsey & Company and wealth management at UBS before diving into entrepreneurship.

Stealth

Founder: Brian Lubega

Stealth since May 2024

Geography: Germany

Background: Entrepreneur in Residence at Antler before going into stealth. His background is in operations and strategy working in organizations such as rebuy recommerce, FREE NOW, Zalando SE and others.

🔍 New Companies: Fintech

In our first edition, we asked what sector we should highlight next. A big thanks to the 80+ investors that voted, with fintech coming out as winner!

Here are some early stage fintech startups we’ve sourced recently 👇

Powerbroker AI

Founder: Marcus G.

Geography: US

Description: AI insurance specialist designed to help property and casualty (P&C) insurance companies increase productivity and revenue by analyzing policies, compare quotes, prospect more business and serve more customers.

Founder Background: 2x founder, worked at Ebay as a product manager and was an intern at google

Stakeroo

Founder: Bahila Hijazi

Geography: Germany

Description: Stakeroo is a self-custodial platform that helps simplifies DeFi passive income for non-crypto users, making it accessible to everyone

Founder Background: Previous experience working as the Partnership lead at Pendulum, Satoshipay & TheStandard - all blockchain / web 3.0 projects. With blockchain and DeFi research background at Phoenix.io and ZeFi Foundation.

Waterfall Credit

Founder: Aarian D.

Geography: US

Description: Waterfall Credit is a platform that provides retailers with the capability to check multiple financing options to offer their customers without impacting their credit score.

Founder Background: Straight out of university of Michigan with an Economics background.

Edda Pay

Founder: Angel Marita Kirkegaard

Geography: Denmark

Description: Edda Pay is a fintech service aimed at transforming how authors receive royalties, making the system quicker, fairer, and more flexible for both authors and publishers.

Background: 9 years of experience in digital design and fintech industry. She’s a co-founder at nakedknit and worked as a Design lead at Storytel. She was the chief creative officer at Cabana A/S and copywriter for media companies.

Sipabo

Founder: Omar Alhmashi

Geography: US

Description: Open banking platform for seamless payment initiations and access to account information.

Background: Worked in the US Army as Human Resource Specialist & investment banking analyst for 2 years at Deutsche Bank.

⚔️ Competitor Sourcing: Synthetic Data Startups

Fairgen recently announced it’s raised $5.5M in fundraising from Maverick Ventures, The Creator Fund, Tal Ventures, Ignia and angel investors to build out statistical AI to help generate synthetic data that says it’s as good as the real thing. Data might be the lifeblood of AI but what happens when there isn’t sufficient quality data for the AI to analyze?

This is where synthetic data plays a major role - Synthetic data refers to artificially generated data that mimics real-world data in terms of structure and statistical properties. It is created using algorithms and models rather than being collected through real-world observations. This type of data is increasingly used in AI and machine learning to train, test, and validate models without the limitations and risks associated with using real data.

We leveraged the market mapper tool in Landscape to find other companies building in the synthetic data space, and here’s what we found 👇