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Week 40 - As long as the music is playing, you've got to get up and dance
Here's your special long-weekend AI update! Another $2B raised in the past week... ๐ฏ
Industry:
๐จOpenAI announces a multi-year global partnership with News Corp (WSJ, The Times, MarketWatch, Barron's etc.). The deal is rumored to be valued at $250M+ over 5 years. IMO, data copyright will be one of the most important topics in AI. (https://lnkd.in/gA6bdQvY)
๐จMicrosoft continues to invest in SLMs (Small Language Models). At its developer conference last week, the company announced the general availability of its Phi-3 models and Phi-3 14B. (https://lnkd.in/gkZAkqvJ). I foresee SLMs to be a key area of innovation, particularly as it relates to edge use cases. If one looks back at history, a good rule of thumb is that all technologies get bigger before they get smaller (computers, mobile phones, transistors, etc).
๐จThe information reports that Meta is considering charging users for a more advanced version of its assitant, Meta AI (https://lnkd.in/gzusXsdg)
๐จ Mistral announces a partnership with legal startup Harvey. (https://lnkd.in/grBFGC6J).
Financing and M&A:
๐จ Scale AI raises $1B at a $13.8B valuation led by existing investor Accel with nearly all existing investors participating. The company's revenue was at around $700M last year, up 150% y/y and expects 2024 revenue to double to $1.4B. (https://lnkd.in/gE4kHu6G)
๐จ DeepL, a company that specializes in neural machine translation, raised a $300M Series B at a $2B valuation, led by Index Ventures. The company has over 100,000 businesses using its tools and has grown mostly organically thus far. (https://lnkd.in/gRrksptd)
๐จ H raises a $220M seed round to work on AI agents. The company was founded by Stanford University researcher Charles Kantor along with four other DeepMind researchers. (https://lnkd.in/gpJpJz_G)
๐จ Suno raises $125M to build the foundational model for music. One thing that Sam Altman recently said in the All-in podcast is that music is one area that OpenAI is not going after due to copyrighting risks. This may open the door up to startups. (https://lnkd.in/gEci7a2B?)
๐จ Praktika raises $35.5M to use AI avatars to make learning language feel more natural. Praktika claims to have 1.2 million active monthly users across 100 countries and said it generated revenue of almost $20 million in the last 12 months. (https://lnkd.in/gN_PNGmH)
๐จ Atropos Health raises $33M in a Series B round. The startup was a Stanford spinout that uses publication grade real-world evidence to guide clinical decisions. (https://lnkd.in/gZrzKbwt)
Research:
๐จGemini 1.5 technical report (https://lnkd.in/g2wqeDcm)
Other Interesting Resources:
๐จ A good summary of everything that got announced in Google I/O 2024 (https://lnkd.in/gba_xE3P)