- Google is planning to revamp its voice assistant, Assistant, with technology based on large language models (LLMs).
- The article raises the question of which software companies will benefit the most from the LLM boom.
- Tech giants like Google, Meta Platforms, and Microsoft are well positioned to incorporate LLMs into their products.
- However, investors have also placed sizable bets on general-purpose LLM developers, with over $12 billion in VC money going into six LLM providers in the past year.
- OpenAI is receiving a significant investment of $10 billion from Microsoft, but other LLM providers are also attracting substantial investments.
Main topic: DynamoFL, a privacy- and compliance-focused generative artificial intelligence (AI) solutions startup, has raised $15.1 million in a series A funding round.
Key points:
1. The funding round was led by Nexus Venture Partners and Canapi Ventures.
2. The capital will be used to expand DynamoFL's team of machine learning scientists and privacy experts.
3. The startup aims to scale its team in India and expects to have 25 percent of its workforce there.
Main topic: Generative AI startups and their funding in Europe.
Key points:
1. Generative AI startups in Europe have raised a record $620m this year.
2. Investors are showing a strong interest in these startups, with FOMO-driven deal-making.
3. Some notable generative AI startups in Europe include Charm Therapeutics, Nanograb, Dust, ElevenLabs, DeepSearch Labs, IOMED, Lucinity, Auto-Pilot, Gladia, PhotoRoom, Cradle, Orbital Materials, Sereact, Beam AI, Qdrant, QuantPi, Humanloop, Co:Helm, Briink, Eilla, and Embedd.
Main topic: Funding announcement for Caden's data AI platform
Key points:
1. Caden has raised $15 million in a Series A funding round led by Nava Ventures.
2. The funding will accelerate the development and go-to-market of Caden's data AI platform.
3. Caden empowers users to monetize their personal data and provides enterprise customers with a unique data set through its intelligence suite, CadenOS.
Main Topic: Elemental Cognition's AI startup, led by David Ferrucci, secures nearly $60 million in funding.
Key Points:
1. David Ferrucci, former IBM Watson team leader, has raised $59.95 million in equity sales from 17 investors.
2. Elemental Cognition aims to create AI with advanced reasoning capabilities and offers two chatbot solutions, Cogent and Cora, for various applications.
3. The company's hybrid AI platform integrates large language models with an AI-driven reasoning engine for precise and controlled responses.
The main topic is David Ferrucci's AI startup called Elemental Cognition, which has raised nearly $60 million in funding.
Key points:
1. Elemental Cognition seeks to develop AI that "thinks before it talks" and offers two enterprise chatbot products.
2. The company's leadership team includes former IBM and Bridgewater Associates executives.
3. Elemental differentiates itself by combining large language models with an AI-powered reasoning engine for better responses.
Main topic: Genesis Therapeutics' $200 million Series B funding round for its AI-powered drug discovery platform in the biotech sector.
Key points:
1. Genesis Therapeutics closed a $200 million Series B funding round, led by Andreessen Horowitz Bio + Health and an unnamed U.S.-based life-sciences-focused investor.
2. New investors in the round included Fidelity Management & Research Co., BlackRock, and Nvidia’s venture arm NVentures.
3. Genesis Therapeutics plans to use the funding to evolve into a clinical stage company, invest in its AI platform, and expand its discovery pipeline.
Main topic: Investment strategy for generative AI startups
Key points:
1. Understanding the layers of the generative AI value stack to identify investment opportunities.
2. Data: The challenge of accuracy in generative AI and the potential for specialized models using proprietary data.
3. Middleware: The importance of infrastructure and tooling companies to ensure safety, accuracy, and privacy in generative AI applications.
Main topic: Portkey.ai raises $3 million in funding to support the development of generative AI apps.
Key points:
1. Portkey.ai enables businesses to quickly create generative AI apps.
2. The startup targets midmarket and enterprise companies, as well as generative AI startups.
3. The funding round was led by Lightspeed and will be used to make it easier to adopt large language models (LLMs) when launching an app.
Main Topic: AI startup Hugging Face seeking to raise millions from Salesforce and other investors
Key Points:
1. Hugging Face aims to raise $200 million in venture capital, with Salesforce leading the round.
2. Hugging Face operates a platform similar to GitHub for hosting AI models, with over 100,000 open-source models available.
3. The proposed investment would value Hugging Face at $4 billion, positioning it as a key player in the development of open-source AI technologies.
Hugging Face, an AI startup, has raised $235 million in a Series D funding round, with participation from tech giants such as Google, Amazon, Nvidia, and IBM, and now has a valuation of $4.5 billion, signaling the growing demand for AI platforms and tools.
Main topic: AI startup Modular raises $100 million in funding round.
Key points:
1. Modular has raised $100 million in a funding round led by General Catalyst, with participation from Google Ventures, SV Angel, Greylock, and Factory.
2. The company did not disclose the valuation at which it raised capital, but a report by The Information put it at $600 million.
3. Modular aims to provide a more affordable alternative to AI development for enterprises through its software, bypassing the need for expensive chips from tech companies like Nvidia.
Main topic: Aily Labs, an AI-for-enterprise startup, raises €19m in funding to expand its team and further develop its AI models for productivity and efficiency in various industries.
Key points:
1. Aily Labs uses AI models to create products that increase productivity, efficiency, and cost-savings for clients, particularly in the pharmaceutical industry.
2. The startup differentiates itself by leveraging existing open-source AI models and utilizing a combination of machine learning approaches, including classification and regression models.
3. With the funding, Aily Labs plans to expand its GenAI team, diversify its client base beyond pharmaceutical companies, and enhance its capabilities in text generation and competitive intelligence.
A new startup called Ideogram has launched with $16.5 million in funding and aims to differentiate itself from other AI image generators by offering reliable text generation within the image, such as lettering on signs and company logos.
Main topic: AI startup Hugging Face raises $235 million in Series D funding round.
Key points:
1. Hugging Face's latest funding round brings its total capital raised to $395.2 million, valuing the firm at $4.5 billion.
2. Hugging Face provides data science tools and a model hub with over a million repositories.
3. The startup aims to be the open platform empowering the paradigm shift towards AI.
Main topic: Former Meta researchers raise $40 million to build new AI language models for biology.
Key points:
1. Former researchers from Meta have launched a startup called EvolutionaryScale and raised $40 million in funding.
2. The startup aims to develop AI language models for biology that can aid in the development of cancer-fighting cells and organisms that clean up toxic waste.
3. The team has already created a transformers-based model trained on protein molecule data, which can predict the structures of unknown proteins and has the potential to advance drug development and industrial chemical manufacturing.
Main topic: Recognition of top startups in the ed tech, generative AI, retail tech, and fintech sectors
Key points:
1. Uppy, a Turkish ed tech startup, received the title of "Second Best Ed Tech Startup" at the G-20 DIA Summit.
2. Syntonym, a pioneer in generative AI, raised $900K in a seed funding round to protect privacy in the face of facial recognition technologies.
3. REM People, a provider of AI-based retail analytics, invested $1 million in Hoopla, a B2B e-commerce platform, to become a hub for AI-powered retail technology.
4. Craftgate, a payment orchestration platform, secured a $1 million investment to enhance its fintech portfolio and support e-commerce partners.
The most promising AI startups in 2023, according to top venture capitalists, include Adept, AlphaSense, Captions, CentML, Character.AI, Durable, Entos, Foundry, GPTZero, Hugging Face, LangChain, Leena AI, LlamaIndex, Luma AI, Lumachain, Magic, Mezli, Mindee, Next Insurance, Orby AI, Pinecone, Poly, Predibase, Replicant, Replicate, Run:ai, SaaS Labs, Secureframe, Treat, Twelve Labs.
AI21 Labs, a text-generating AI startup, has raised $155 million in a Series C funding round, bringing its total raised to $283 million and valuing the company at $1.4 billion, with plans to expand its workforce and accelerate its R&D efforts.
Chinese companies and research institutions, including Baidu and ByteDance, have opened their AI-powered large language models to the public after receiving approval from Chinese authorities, with Baidu's language model Ernie Bot now fully available for download and feedback.
AI has garnered immense investment from venture capitalists, with over $40 billion poured into AI startups in the first half of 2023, raising concerns about who will benefit financially from its potential impact.
AI In brief X, formerly known as Twitter, has updated its privacy policy to state that it may train its AI models on user posts, with the policy change expected to take effect on September 29; however, CEO Elon Musk has clarified that private data, such as text in direct messages, will not be used to train the models.
Doug Lenat, a prominent figure in the field of AI, has passed away, leaving behind a legacy of pioneering work in neurosymbolic systems and machine reasoning.
AI21 Labs, an Israeli startup, has raised $155 million in its Series C round, with a valuation of $1.4 billion; the company offers API access to its language models and tools designed for various tasks like summarization and question answering.
US newspaper chain Gannett has temporarily halted the publication of AI-generated sports articles after the machine-written pieces received criticism for their errors and poor writing quality.
Imbue, an AI research lab, has secured $200 million in Series B funding, with a valuation of $1 billion, to develop AI agents that can code using reasoning as their foundation model. The funding round included participation from Astera Institute, Nvidia, Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt, Notion co-founder Simon Last, and others.
European AI startup Druid has raised $30 million in a Series B funding round to support its U.S. growth, which currently accounts for the majority of its revenue, as it expands its conversational business applications powered by generative AI.
LastMile AI has raised $10 million in a seed funding round to develop and integrate generative AI models into apps, aiming to democratize generative AI for software engineers and simplify the AI developer journey.
Cloud data company Databricks has raised $500 million in a Series I funding round led by T. Rowe and joined by Capital One, with a valuation of $43 billion and a focus on generative AI models for enterprise data.
Accenture has invested in Writer, a platform that uses generative AI to help enterprises create and shape content, with the aim of increasing productivity and driving business impact across various functions.
AI startup Darrow has raised $35 million in funding for its AI-powered data engine that searches for class action litigation potential, with active cases resulting from its insights currently totaling around $10 billion in claims, and plans to use the funding to expand its team, add new legal domains to its tools, and invest in technology assets.
Writer, a generative AI startup, has raised $100 million in a Series B funding round to develop industry-specific text-generating AI models, bringing its total raised to $126 million and valuing the company at between $500 million and $750 million post-money.
Consulting firms are investing billions of dollars in expanding their Generative AI capabilities to meet strong client demand for deploying Generative AI applications and services, with the expectation that these investments will be paid back within a few months of deployment through cost savings and revenue increases.
Investors are focusing on the technology stack of generative AI, particularly the quality of data, in order to find startups with defensible advantages and potential for dominance.
AlphaSense, a business-to-business artificial intelligence platform, has raised $150 million in funding, led by Bond and joined by Alphabet's investment arm, CapitalG, Goldman Sachs, and Viking Global, bringing its valuation to $2.5 billion; the company uses machine learning to provide deep insights into business and finance analytics and aims to revolutionize search for enterprise customers.
European AI startups, including Mistral, ElevenLabs, and Synthesia, have attracted significant investment from venture capitalists, with investors pouring $51.9 billion into AI startups in 2023, surpassing the $65.5 billion invested in the sector in 2022. Notable investors in the European AI startup scene include Simon Menashy of MMC Ventures, Amelia Armour of Amadeus Capital, Mish Mashkautsan of Phoenix Court, and Remy Minute of Ascension.
Character.AI, a startup specializing in chatbots capable of impersonating anyone or anything, is reportedly in talks to raise hundreds of millions of dollars in new funding, potentially valuing the company at over $5 billion.
AI Clearing, an AI-powered platform, has raised $14 million in a Series A funding round led by Prudence to expand its construction progress tracking and quality control technology for large infrastructure projects.
Cambridge-based startup Unitary AI has raised $15 million in Series A funding to expand its "multimodal" approach to content moderation, which combines text, sound, and visuals to better analyze videos and improve accuracy in identifying harmful content. The funding will be used to hire more talent and expand into new regions. The company's platform is already classifying 6 million videos per day, and its annual recurring revenue is now in the millions, although specific customer names were not disclosed.
Induced AI, a startup founded by teenagers, has raised $2.3 million in seed funding to develop a platform that automates workflows by converting plain English instructions into pseudo-code and utilizing browser automation to complete tasks previously handled by back offices. The platform allows for bi-directional interaction and can handle complex processes, making it distinct from existing models in the industry.
AI startup Anthropic is reportedly in talks with investors, including Google, to raise an additional $2 billion in funding at a valuation between $20 billion and $30 billion, just weeks after securing a $4 billion investment from Amazon. Meanwhile, rival OpenAI is said to be considering selling shares at a staggering $90 billion valuation, a significant surge from its valuation of $29 billion just a few months ago. Other AI startups, such as Character.AI and Prins AI, are also seeking significant valuation jumps in their funding rounds.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has announced a $30 million investment in an AI platform in Africa to aid scientists in developing solutions for healthcare and social issues, aiming to make AI more accessible and ensure equitable development.
More than 40 startups specializing in artificial intelligence (AI) across various industries will be pitching at the finals of the Expand North Star event in Dubai, where they will compete for a prize fund of $200,000.
Generative AI start-ups, such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Builder.ai, are attracting investments from tech giants like Microsoft, Amazon, and Alphabet, with the potential to drive significant economic growth and revolutionize industries.
Creative Force, an AI-powered content operations workflow provider, has raised $8.9 million in Series A funding to expand its platform and establish a new office in Boston, with a focus on integrating generative artificial intelligence into its platform and becoming the leading content creation platform in the US.
Spending on generative AI solutions, which includes software, hardware, and IT/business services, is predicted to reach $143 billion by 2027, with enterprises investing nearly $16 billion in 2023 alone, according to a new report by International Data Corporation (IDC). This represents a compound annual growth rate of 73.3% over the 2023-2027 forecast period and demonstrates that generative AI is becoming a transformative technology with significant business impact.
