For some, AI fatigue is real — but clearly venture investors haven’t grown tired of the category. In the first half of 2024 alone, more than $35.5 billion was invested into AI startups globally, recent Crunchbase data found. Five of the six venture rounds of more than $1 billion raised in the first half of […]
Here’s the full list of 35 US AI startups that have raised $100M or more in 2024 Read More »
SparkLabs — an early-stage venture capital firm that has made a name for itself for backing OpenAI as well as a host of other AI startups such as Vectara, Allganize, Kneron, Anthropic, xAI, Glade (YC S23) and Lucidya AI — is gearing up to double down more startups in the space. The VC firm announced
SparkLabs closes $50M fund to back AI startups Read More »
Harvey Mason Jr., CEO of the Recording Academy, caused a stir a few months ago. He announced that the organization’s prestigious Grammy Awards would finally accept music made with artificial intelligence. At first, people were confused, and then Mason came out to clarify that he meant only humans can submit to the awards, but that
Grammy CEO says music industry also has AI concerns Read More »
OpenAI is in talks to raise a new round of funding at an eye-popping $100 billion-plus valuation, sources told the Wall Street Journal this week. It turns out investors have already proven they are willing to value the company that high to get on OpenAI’s coveted cap table. Multiple companies that track or facilitate secondaries
Investors are already valuing OpenAI at over $100B on the secondaries market Read More »
VCs are increasingly buying shares of late-stage startups on the secondary market as they try to get pieces of the hottest ones — especially AI companies. But they are also increasingly doing so through financial instruments called special purpose vehicles (SVPs). Some of those SPVs are becoming such hot commodities that they are commanding premium
VCs are so eager for AI startups, they’re buying into each others’ SPVs at high prices Read More »
Startups overall are still facing strong headwinds when it comes to raising venture capital funding. Q2 was only a modest improvement on the low points of the previous two quarters, according to Crunchbase. But there is one category that still seems to be opening doors — and checkbooks: AI. In the U.S., artificial intelligence accounted
The top AI deals in Europe this year Read More »
When advertising agencies create ads for clients, they don’t just make one advert, but potentially hundreds of iterations for a ream of platforms, and that can be pretty manually intensive. Creatopy, which automates ad-creation using AI, has now raised a $10 million Series A co-led by European VCs 3VC (based out of Austria) and Point
Creatopy, which automates ad creation using AI, raises a $10M Series A Read More »
For some businesses, there is a clear path to growth that doesn’t involve acquiring other companies or expanding organically: franchising. The U.S. has more than 800,000 franchise businesses, according to Statista, and that number is predicted to keep growing year over year. But franchising a business — licensing a business model and brand to an
Harmonyze wants to build AI agents to help franchisors make sense of unstructured data Read More »
In 2020, Kathryn Wu launched a side hustle while she was working as a product engineer at Pinterest. Wu started a milk tea company, Ohtea, with the hopes of connecting with local grocery stores and gift shops to get them to carry the tea. She quickly realized how difficult it was to not only be
Openmart wants to make it easier for enterprises to sell to local businesses Read More »
The release of ChatGPT in November 2022 sparked a new wave of AI companies. It also brought attention to the companies that were already building in the space like Etched. Etched co-founder and CEO Gavin Uberti said on a recent episode of TechCrunch’s Found podcast that his company “stands on the shoulders of giants.” While
Etched founder Gavin Uberti thinks his company stands on the “shoulders of giants” Read More »
