Welcome to the new NMA Monday Alert!
Innovation is all about change and every once in a while we truly eat our own dog food and change things to become more innovative. This time we change the format of our newsletter. And we hope you like it. ✌🏻
Also, we’re now on
and we did this change basically because we got inspired by the newsletters sent out by and - and we figured we might try something like that, but a lot different.Anyhow, we aim to give you quick updates about what is going on at NMA and also give you a brief glimpse of what we think is important in the startup ecosystem at the moment, so that you get a few takeaways from every NMA Monday Alert we send out. You will find the NMA Monday Alert in your inbox every Monday Morning, at least when you are in the Central European Timezone.
Why is it called NMA Monday Alert? Basically because Nico was reminded of his roots in the Open Source movement in the 90s and how he liked the recursive acronym GNU (GNU’s Not Unix) and therefore we came up with NMA Monday Alert, which could be abbreviated with NMA, if you want to.
With all that mystique out of the way, let’s get to it!
👉🏻 Quick NMA Updates ⚡️
The teams at MediaFutures, our European consortium on misinformation and desinformation, had a great and productive time in Barcelona during 4YFN and MWC - and now it is time for mid-term status updates.
The startups at STADIEM also are doing their mid-term status updates and are working on their collaborations with media companies associated with the four innovation hubs in Norway, Belgium, Estonia and Germany.
Besides that, the STADIEM consortium used SXSW in Austin last week to bring our of a pan-European media accelerator to the US!
We just had our monthly GAN Europe Roundtable Videocall and invited
from to give us an overview of VC funds in Europe, investment activities and sectors & regions to watch in the near future. Also we discussed the impact on the Russian war on Ukraine for the European startup ecosystem, both in terms of investment activity (or lack thereof) and increased shortage of developers due to less nearshoring possibilites in Ukraine.Spectrm was our first investment back in 2015 and they are still on a roll, innovating the conversational marketing space with clever implementations of AI. It’s so cool to see that everybody is talking about Generative AI these days and Spectrm actually delivers it.
Our portfolio-company Midesk just announced that they got invited to use the brandspanking new ChatGPT-4 API, which will allow Midesk to improve on its AI-driven market intelligence platform even more.
We are impressed by the quality of applications for the AI challenge on fighting misinformation and fake news. Together with our partners from KI Park Berlin, Deloitte, VDE and Gauly we selected the five finalists who will pitch to the jury in May. Stay tuned for the official announcements!
Our friends from medianet berlinbrandenburg will host a female investors dinner on May 4th. Applications are open until March 24th, all female founders should hurry up to get on the list!
We’re happy to partner with the International Press Institute on the IPI World Congress & Media Innovation Festival in Vienna, May 25-26. Make sure to register and meet us there! The topic is: New Frontiers in the Age of AI
🎢 Startup Ecosystem Updates 🚀
Silicon Valley Bank’s Failure Deals a Blow to Europe’s Startups
The ripple effect came across the pond and I wonder if banks will finally wake up and try to understand what startups really need. Hint: it’s all about being there for a company and understanding their business model instead of still labeling the startup ecosystem “unconventional”.
Silicon Valley Bank’s Deep Ties to the Tech Industry
Maybe all those financial bros were not that clever after all and should have tried diversifying theirs assets. We’ll all be cleverer for the next financial crisis, where tax payers have to bail out banks.
Cash management at startups
When Christoph Janz writes something, it’s always worth reading. Especially if you’re running a startup.
The tech behind Artifact, the newly launched news aggregator from Instagram’s co-founders
Some people just haven’t read the memo that media startups are not en vogue anymore, but what do the Instagram founders know about B2C apps anyways?
The great computing stagnation
This guest post over at
is thought provoking - have we reached a plateau in tech development in the West?Food for Thought
Think about this.
Have a great start into the week! We hope you like our new format!