🔎 2023 Startup Signals

Joel Hansen

Jan 27, 2023 • 5 min read

Hey Friends,

Welcome back to the Kernal newsletter: the booster juice of startup ideas. You toss your idea in our blender and we tell you if it tastes any good.🥤

Latest news: Kim K did something at Harvard. J-Biebs sold his back pocket of music ideas for $200m. Layoff bells are still ringing. Every CEO is @ an offsite. Chat GPT premium is $42/mo. Gas got acquired by Discord. Kernal's home feed got photos. VCs are tweeting 2023 outlooks.

Gotta run and meet a friend for dinner soon so keeping today's word count tight.🍷

💸 Startup signals we're reading
📈 Hot startup ideas to skim
📩 New investor newsletter brewing
🐥 Timely tweets

Right now you're hanging at the Kernal coffee shop. And there's nothing wrong with that. But you're clicks away from a 3-course Michelin star meal. Tap below to try a glass of Merlot.👇

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💸 Funding Signals We're Seeing

We got an absolute beast of an email from Kernaler Drake Dukes the other day. It reminded us of 3 things:

we love hearing from Kernalers 🌱
you should send us an email if you haven't 📩
we should share 2023 startup signals for builders 🔎

Drake (the Keneral user, not the rapper) has a cool data company called Launch Gravity that detects the movement of founders, startups and VC deals.

It tells you stuff like "alumni Sally Wooden, formerly the VP of product Airbnb, has launched a startup called Stargaze and closed a $2m seed round led by Craft Ventures". Then you get the contact info and reach out to her and stuff.

Anyways, for the freemium email subscribers like myself (#recessionbudget) he sends a monthly update on where the money's going, who's getting it and where the top places to build are.

And we alllllll know every founder and their dog wants to know that info. So we rounded up some high-level stats to help you crush the year 🥁

🔎 The Quick Facts

Avg Seed Round Size: $3,166,714 (Median: $2,000,000)
Avg Series A Round Size: $15,557,708 (Median: $12,150,000)
Avg Series B Round Size: $38,333,443 (Median: $20,000,000)
Avg Team Size: 631 Employees (Median: 22 Employees)

💰 Largest Seed Deals

Traitology | $25M
Nillion | $20M
Maergo | $20M
Deep Voodoo | $20M
Alternative Bio | $15M

✨ The top sectors currently receiving funding are:

Health Care
Software
Information Technology
Biotechnology
Manufacturing
Financial Services
Medical
Artificial Intelligence
FinTech
SaaS

Hack of the day nobody wants you to know...

You can search all of the terms above (such as software) into Kernal and the top startup ideas will populate on the system.

We should probably pay wall that or something but that's a problem for another day. We'll give it away for now to the Kernal OG's that are reading the newsletter.

Imagine the opportunities you could pounce on when you can search for startup ideas in a specific niche that has….

30+ upvotes of support
customers waiting to drop cash on a solution
and a product roadmap you can validate in the comments

That's powerful information no Twitter thread's giving you.

Search Software Startup Ideas

And if investing's more your thing, scroll below. We're whipping up something right up your alley.

Don't all get up at once. We know you're curious to get the freshest deals. So are we. Before we do that, we wanna spill the beans.

Our current problem at Kernal is, we have a weekly newsletter that goes out every Friday to 10,000+ people with a ~50% open rate. That's great, we're not complaining.

The problem is, it's quite founder-focused. It's about helping first, second and even third-time founders find their next opportunity to validate and pounce on.

Solution: we wanna help our investor network (the 2,000 of you) by emailing you a different newsletter on Sundays.

It'll cover things like:

High-conviction startup ideas raising rounds
Email introduction service for builders we know
Trends angel investors, VCs and family offices are watching

We'll keep this Friday newsletter focused on the founder goods. Then we'll have a Sunday newsletter focused on the investor goods.

We're in the midst of hiring a couple writers to spin up the hottest Sunday update on the market so if you want early access when it's live hit that button below.

Join Investor Newsletter

*email newsletter@kern.al if you wanna toss your resume in the ring