🚀 Launching AI Venture Pulse! 🚀
We are so excited to have you on our AI & Investment journey!
Hey there, lovely souls! 🌟
It's Duanduan and Hanhan (intro in About), and we're thrilled to share our little secret with you - AI Venture Pulse!
💌 Picture this: your two cheerful buddies not only navigating the intricate maze of AI but also serving up weekly investment trackers, insights on fresh trends, and deep dives into groundbreaking companies and tools. Sounds exhilarating, right? That's because it is!
🗄️ What's in store for you?
Weekly AI Investment Tracker: Stay in the know with our weekly investment updates, human-filtered to save you reading time and to leave with only the “real” AI deals, ensuring you never skip a beat in the dynamic AI investment arena.
Insightful AI Narratives: Whether it's the latest trend, core knowledge, or pioneering applications, we're on a mission to demystify AI and make it relatable.
Spotlight on Companies & Tools: Dive deep with us into the vast seas of AI as we spotlight innovative companies and tools, breaking down what makes them tick and why they matter.
Bringing the Great Minds to You: Our passion doesn’t stop at just discussing AI. We are avid conference attendees, volunteers, and event organizers. Through these platforms, we'll be interviewing some of the brightest minds in the field, ensuring you get firsthand insights straight from the source!
If you've ever felt AI was a blend of intimidating jargon and cold hard numbers, let us warm things up for you! 🤖 We're here to inject personality, sprinkle in anecdotes, and ensure your AI journey feels as cozy as a chat with old friends.
From our screens to yours, with lots of geeky love and enthusiasm,
Duanduan & Hanhan 💕
🙈 Who are we?
Grew up as family friends in Beijing, China
Currently based in the California Bay area, US + London, UK
AI ML DS in top global tech & consulting firms + member of an early-stage team in AI startup, US/EMEA strategy/funding advisor for another start-up
MIT + LSE
Let’s stay connected! Subscribe to AI Venture Pulse and let the future of AI land in your inbox!" 🌟💌
🔥 AI Deals of the Week
TL;DR: Data Pipeline, Message, Accounting, Call Center, AI Product Builder, Clinical Trials, Video Description, Financial Unstructured Data, Cybersecurity, Legal, Text-to-Video, Influencer, Publisher, Model Optimization
Databricks will acquire Acrion, a cloud-native, zero-code data mobility platform to help deploy high-performance, real-time data pipelines based in San Mateo, CA, US.
Keywords: Acquisition, Data Pipeline
The deal is valued at over $100M. According to PitchBook, the company was valued at $65M in its last funding round in 2022, and has raised $18M since 2016. It has built more than 20 connectors to databases including Oracle, PostgreSQL and Snowflake.
Luzia closed $10M in series A led by Khosla Ventures, after launching in April 2023 and a previous $3M seed round in June.
Keywords: Message, Assistant
Headquartered in Madrid, Spain, it is building an AI assistant to simplify tasks through WhatsApp and Telegram, with API connections to AI inference providers, and has processed over 900 million messages. It is planning to launch in the US after receiving the recent funding.
Basis Technology raised a $3.6M seed round led by Better Tomorrow Ventures.
Keywords: Accounting
It is announcing its first two products to assist accountants: “Basis Intern” as a general AI assistant, and “Basis Accountant” that is customized for each company’s specific workflow.
Keywords: Call Center, Guidance
It uses emotion and conversation AI to deliver real-time coaching to improve call center agents’ effectiveness, experience and empathy.
Keywords: Building AI Products
Klu helps other companies utilize LLM APIs to build products with AI embedded in them. Similar companies include another London-based company TitanML, which also raised recently.
Keywords: Pharmaceuticals, Clinical Trial
The round is led by Viola Ventures and Exor Ventures. PhaseV offers two service lines: one for trial design and execution, and another for retrospective hidden signal analysis of past trial data. Oramed Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: ORMP) used PhaseV’s service to analyze its Phase 3 trial in the US for treatment of type II diabetes.
Keywords: Computer Vision, Video Description
This marks Nvidia’s first direct investment in GenAI start-up in South Korea. Since 2021, the company has developed AI models that understand video content, beating competitors including Columbia University and Tencent in a technology contest by Microsoft. It has raised money from Index Ventures and has Fei-Fei Li (professor, Stanford) and Aidan Gomez (co-founder, Cohere) as advisors.
Oxolo, a text-to-video platform company, raised €13M in Series A led by DN Capital.
Keywords: Text-to-Video, E-Commerce
It targets e-commerce stores to create AI product demonstration videos with AI actors.
Keywords: Legal
The company envisions Eve to be a new team member for lawyers, helping them to review documents and conduct research.
LegalMation received $15M in series A led by Aquiline Capital Partners LP.
Keywords: Legal, Litigation
The company focuses on utilizing AI to transform litigation and dispute resolution. It generates specific documents tailored to claims, allegations and requests, within the attorney’s own style and response strategy.
Faction received another funding round led by TDK Ventures.
Keywords: EV
The company develops software to enable driverless capabilities on EV vehicles. It targets automakers manufacturing driverless delivery vehicles.
Arteria AI announced a $30M series B led by GGV Capital US.
Keywords: Financial Institution, Unstructured Data
The company is developing solutions to turn documents into data for financial institutions. It has received strategic investment from BDC and Citi, and is launching the service with Citi, Goldman Sachs, and other undisclosed banks.
Keywords: IoT
Scenera provides orchestration of AI analytics from edge to cloud. TnM offers edge AI provisioning, AI integration, and camera-based AI system.
1337 (pronounced leet) emerged from stealth and raised a $4M pre-seed round.
Keywords: Influencer, Ecosystem
It offers an ecosystem of AI-driven micro influencers to connect with each other. One of the co-founders, Robin Raszka, previously created Alter, a consumer AI startup backed by X (Twitter), and sold it to Google for $100 million in 2022.
Cranium raised $25M in series A to build Enterprise AI security products and services.
Keywords: Cybersecurity, Enterprise
One of the products, “AI Card”, creates a file with information about a customer-provided AI model’s value, purpose, data and governance. The customer can then share the card with third-parties.
Direqt raised a $4.5M seed round to build chatbot for the world’s leading publishers.
Keywords: Publisher, Chatbot
It offers customized chatbots based on each publisher’s content. The readers can retrieve information from the publisher’s website through chat conversations.
L’école AI raised $3M in the seed round led by Sofinnova Partners.
Keywords: Computer Vision, Medical
The company simplifies computer vision system engineering complexity for medical professionals. One of the co-founders and the president, Etezad-Heydari, co-founded Madbits which was acquired by Twitter for an undisclosed amount.
CentML raised $27M in an extended seed round.
Keywords: Model Optimization
The company aims to predict and lower the cost to train and deploy a model. It was co-founded by Pekhimenko, an associate professor at the University of Toronto. It also offers a compiler to optimize the model without losing model accuracy and is claimed to outperform OctoML’s compiler, another competitor in the space.