Donât miss these Chronosphere buys Calyptia: Startup M&A could be a big theme this year, so weâre keeping close tabs on startups that are feeling acquisitive. Today, Chronosphere, a startup that offers a cloud-native observability platform, has acquired Calyptia, which is commercializing some open source tech. The deal could broaden the remit of Chronosphereâs suite of offerings. XRP eyes enterprise future: The regulatory fog that crypto has endured for a while in the United States is lifting ever so slightly, which is making crypto projects big and small more bullish on the future. Ripple and its XRP token are no exceptions, Jacquelyn Melinek reports. Sony and Zee will not merge: Sony is not going to end up closing a merger of its Indian unit with media conglomerate Zee Entertainment to form a $10 billion giant. Sony is bummed about the dealâs failure, which underscores just how large and important the Indian market is for digital entertainment companies and tech startups alike. Captain looking to command $50M more: Speaking of India, a local startup called Captain Fresh is hunting for $50 million. The company operates a harvest-to-retail marketplace for animal protein, which is a fancy way of saying that it connects fishermen and others of their ilk to places that sell their goods to consumers. Nekkanti Sea Foods, SBI Investment, Evolvence, Tiger Global and Prosus Ventures are in the mix as potential backers for its next round. AI bossware may be messware: AI is cool, but not all it’s going to be used for will be. Bossware is one such category. Sure, companies have been using software to keep tabs on employees for years, but AI opens up all sorts of new ways to dig into how productive workers are, and how they might be tuned. If that sounds miserable, thatâs because you arenât a CEO! (Note: I am also not a CEO.) Team Equity recently interviewed Aileen Lee, and has a deep dive with Crunchbaseâs Gene Teare coming this week on all things 2023 venture capital. Remember to tune in! $3.7M more for Kenyan agtech: Shamba Pride just snagged a new funding round for its business that provides last-mile distribution for farm inputs and tackles price exploitation and quality issues for farmers. African startups have seen venture demand for their shares wither in the present downturn, so this round is a notable transaction. We have even more: EU rules are affecting how Meta deals with user accounts; LoanDepot was breached; and AI might not be coming for as many of our jobs as we feared. | 