Exited founder & fintech exec building the financial intelligence platform for back-office

Welcome to the 73rd edition of the Geeks Of The Valley (GOTV) Newsletter, where we curate interesting early-stage startups (Series A and earlier) every week. If you enjoy and want to keep abreast with insights and interesting early-stage startups before they go big, subscribe to this newsletter ✌️.

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Geeks of the week

Startup Name: FlowFi (Feel free to reach out to aizuddin@geeksofthevalley.com for an intro)

Geography: US

One-liner: First-class finance team and platform that delivers accurate books and actionable financial intelligence.

Founder(s) Background: Founded and sold company to Constellation Software, Engineering Director at Acorns, VP of Finance & CFO at 2 Series-C startups.

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Startup Name: Chord

Geography: US

One-liner: Generate a bespoke article with recommendations, and understand the research that produces it.

Founder(s) Background: Researchers at Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

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Founders building in stealth

• Director, Enterprise Risk Analytics at BlackRock

• PM at Google

• Investor at Bain Capital Ventures and NFX

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Insight, Idea & Trend

Ryan Hoover @rrhoover

$4.3 trillion (!!!) is spent on healthcare in the US annually, and it’s growing. Great time to build the picks and shovels. Here are some of the infra companies powering new solutions.

Olivia Moore @omooretweets

Potentially hot take: There's a good chance the "TikTok for X" in many categories (sports, fashion, restaurants, etc.) ends up being...TikTok. They have the content + creator density, and are already testing dedicated, topic-focused feeds ⬇️

Deedy @debarghya_das

How much does it cost to train a state-of-the-art foundational LLM? $4M. Facebook's 65B LLaMA trained for 21 days on 2048 Nvidia A100 GPUs. At $3.93/hr on GCP, that's a total of ~$4M. Google's 540B PaLM was trained on 6144 v4 TPUs for 1200hrs. At $3.22/hr is a total of ~$27M