Good day. After about 20 years as a venture capitalist, Charlie O’Donnell, the sole general partner at Brooklyn Bridge Ventures, plans to stop investing after his 105th deal. 

Mr. O’Donnell is a mainstay of New York’s tech community. His annual outdoor burger, fries and conversation events at the Madison Square Park Shake Shack are always popular, and his This Is Going to Be Big blog on investing has had a strong following since its 2004 launch. Yet, Mr. O’Donnell said he is starting to feel out of the loop, which is in part why he has decided to stop investing.

“There are a lot of communities that I’m not tapped into,” Mr. O’Donnell said. The New York tech scene has expanded dramatically, and he doesn’t want to be everywhere all at once at this stage in life.

“The professional and emotional payback is not there for me in a way that was when I first started,” Mr. O’Donnell, 43 years old, said, noting he has a year-and-a-half-old daughter who likes it when he tucks her in at night.

Mr. O’Donnell operates solo and writes lead first checks into startups. To generate strong deal flow, he said he would need to change something in that model. “You gotta go later or you gotta build a firm,” he said, delegating some of these tasks to junior staff.

He expects to still work on his boards and advise existing portfolio companies for some years. Brooklyn Bridge Ventures’ investments include groceries subscription service Hungryroot and fintech startup Petal.

In February, Mr. O’Donnell informed his limited partners he wouldn’t raise another fund and followed up on that in a blog post last week.

In his brief time as a founder years ago, Mr. O’Donnell once pitched a zombie firm, or a firm without capital to invest that acted as if it did. He wanted to hang up his hat in a transparent way, noting “I respect founders’ time.”

And now on to the news...

Biotech IPO. Drugmaker Acelyrin has raised $540 million through an initial public offering despite a chilly market for biotechnology companies seeking to make their stock-market debuts, WSJ Pro's Brian Gormley reports.

• After a surge of biotech IPOs in 2021, the market for these stock sales has slowed as rising interest rates have driven investors from riskier deals. Acelyrin is the seventh biotech to go public this year on the Nasdaq, after 22 held IPOs in 2022 and 110 in 2021. Acelyrin, which upsized its IPO, went public at $18 on Friday and closed up more than 30.5% at $23.50. 
   
• Acelyrin has acquired a portfolio of potential treatments for immunological conditions. Its offering likely doesn’t signal a broader opening of the biotech IPO market because Acelyrin’s management and drug pipeline stand out, said Beth Seidenberg, a venture capitalist who invested in the company. “It takes a special company to go public when a market is in a tenuous or rocky position, “ she said.

Before their startup had customers, a business plan or even a formal name, former Google AI researchers Niki Parmar and Ashish Vaswani were fielding interest from investors eager to back the next big thing in artificial intelligence, The Wall Street Journal reports. At Google, Ms. Parmar and Mr. Vaswani were among the co-authors of a seminal 2017 paper that helped pave the way for the boom in so-called generative AI. Earlier this year, only weeks after striking out on their own, they raised funds that valued their fledgling company—now called Essential AI—at around $50 million, people familiar with the company said.  While most of Silicon Valley’s venture-capital ecosystem remains in the doldrums, investors this year have been pouring funds into companies like Essential specializing in generative AI systems that can create humanlike conversation, imagery and computer code. Many of the firms getting backing are new and unproven.

John Pappajohn, a Greek immigrant in Iowa, was a young insurance agent when he heard the self-help author W. Clement Stone extol the advantages of a positive mental attitude, WSJ reports. Emboldened by Mr. Stone’s advice, Mr. Pappajohn founded his own insurance company in the early 1960s. By the late 1960s, around the age of 40, he was getting bored with insurance. He noticed a Wall Street Journal article about venture capital, then a little-known field, and decided to take up that trade. Some of his early bets—such as a company making lawn mowers and an asbestos-removal service—were flops. He finally scored with an investment in a maker of chemically activated hot and cold packs designed to replace ice packs and hot-water bottles. Another triumph was his stake in a home healthcare company that became Caremark, and he began concentrating on healthcare and medical-technology firms.

Graduates of Stanford University who enter the software industry are out-earning their peers from other schools, according to a salary-based ranking of colleges. Among public schools, graduates from the University of California, Berkeley make the highest pay in software, WSJ reports. The ranking of salaries over the first 10 years in a given field focuses on the impact one’s choice of undergraduate school can make. It was created by Burning Glass, a nonprofit that researches employment trends, and is based on data about experience and pay from Lightcast, a labor-market data firm, and Glassdoor, which rates companies. In all, nine industries were evaluated.

Funds

Cowen Healthcare Investments closed its fourth fund with $555.6 million in commitments to invest primarily in mid- to late-stage life sciences companies, both public and private.

People

Jerusalem Venture Partners added Shlomi Hagai as partner. He was previously group chief financial officer of Contentsquare.

Novidea, an Israel-based insurance agency management system provider, scored $50 million in Series C funding. Battery Ventures led the round, with Partner Shiran Shalev joining the board.

Ace turtle, a provider of technology to retail operations in India, raised $34 million in Series B funding led by Vertex Growth.

Pando, a supply-chain software startup with headquarters in San Jose, Calif., and India, picked up a $30 million investment from Iron Pillar, Uncorrelated Ventures and others.

Hackajob, a technical hiring platform, secured $25 million in Series B financing. Volition Capital led the round, and Managing Partner Sean Cantwell joined the board.

Slash, a San Francisco-based online business bank account startup, secured $19 million in combined seed and Series A funding. New Enterprise Associates led the investment, which included participation from Menlo Ventures. 

Ten63 Therapeutics, a Durham, N.C.-based computational drug discovery startup, closed a $15.9 million Series A round led by Hatteras Venture Partners. Clay Thorp, co-founder and general partner at Hatteras, was appointed chairman of the company’s board.

Surgical Safety Technologies, a Toronto-based startup helping to provide real-time decision making and analytical insights in the areas of safety, compliance and efficiency for hospitals, snagged a $15 million Series A round co-led by U.S. Venture Partners and Santé Ventures.

Bloomfilter, a Cleveland-based process intelligence platform for software development, completed a $5.5 million seed round, which included $1.5 million in debt. Magarac Venture Partners led the equity portion.

GoodShip, a collaborative cloud-based analytics and transportation procurement platform for shippers, was seeded with a $5 million investment co-led by Ironspring Ventures and Chicago Ventures. Ty Findley, co-founder and general partner at Ironspring Ventures, joined the board.

Essenvia, a Los Angeles-based medical device regulatory submission management provider, landed $4 million in pre-Series A financing from investors including Wavemaker360.

• PacWest stock surges 82%, regional banks recover after selloff
   
• Elon Musk’s goal for Twitter: ‘unregretted user-minutes’
   
• TikTok tracked users who watched gay content, prompting employee complaints
   
• Ant’s financial license is in limbo as China shakes up regulatory system
   
• AI researchers worry the U.S. and China will leave everyone else behind
   
• Tech workers aren’t as rich as they used to be
   
• The no-email way to plan a party

• OpenAI’s ChatGPT is shaking up the edtech markets (TechCrunch)
   
• Tech industry keeps outracing the government (Axios)

This newsletter was compiled by Marc Vartabedian and Zachary Cole.

WSJ Pro Venture Capital is a premium service of The Wall Street Journal. We cover venture capital and the global startup ecosystem. Share your tips, comments and questions: vcnews@wsj.com

The Team: Matthew Strozier, Yuliya Chernova, Brian Gormley, Angus Loten, and Marc Vartabedian.

Follow us on Twitter: @wsjvc