📸: Hiro Nishimura

This week we celebrated International Women's Day with some incredible entrepreneurs and technology leaders talking about their experiences, challenges, and how we can all work to gain better gender-balance.

We welcomed Ladies Get Paid Founder, Claire Wasserman, Nisha Dua from BBG Ventures, Ramona Ortega (CEO & Founder of My Money My Future and Entrepreneur in Residence with Azlo), and Arielle Patrick (Senior Vice President & Transaction Director at Edelman) to share their experience on fostering communities of women. They discussed how creating supportive - not competitive! - environments ultimately help everyone rise up.

And tonight we're thrilled to have Studios member Kameka Dempsey organizing an event with a power-house lineup of panelists. They'll explore the theme of International Women's Day, #BalanceForBetter, to talk about how we can all work to gain better gender-balance in the business community.

This week, Peter spoke to VCJ (paywalled) about the Betaworks Ventures investment outlook for 2019, as the fund anticipates making between 9 and 12 seed deals and another 12 to 16 via the pre-seed Camp program.

“We are as active as ever [...] we haven’t slowed our pace.”–Peter Rojas, Betaworks Ventures partner. 

Meanwhile, the teams behind our portfolio of existing investments had much to celebrate. Superplastic, creators of limited edition art toys, released their latest SuperJanky: JANKYFÖRTRESS. Over at Gimlet Media, the team celebrated the 1 year anniversary of Chompers, an Alexa skill that guides kids (and adults!) through the teeth brushing process in a fun and engaging way. SquadApp surpassed 1.5K App Store reviews, whilst Trash beat thousands of applicants to receive a National Science Foundation Research Grant.

Camp OGs Hugging Face have only gone and built another AI best friend! Voice Boloss is an AI friend that you can Facetime with and teenagers are digging it–so much so, in fact, that they've now exchanged over 500 million messages between Hugging Face and Voice Boloss (iOS).

In addition to capturing the attention of teenagers around the world, the Hugging Face team now have the most popular open-source repository of pre-trained transfer-learning models in NLP, which most of the recent progress in NLP is based on (e.g Open AI GPT-2). It is now used by thousands of developers and companies all over the world. #proud