9/15/23

∆ Tech in the News

Senate’s AI Sideshow - The AI bipartisan AI Insight Forum is a bit of a sideshow to the real AI regulation process that will likely happen through exec committees and orders, and the courts as Congress typically moves too slowly.

iPhone 15’s Intuitive AI - Apple’s l launch continued the trend favoring intuitive features like voice isolation, voicemail transcription and photo AI assist over the flashy GenerativeAI hype. But, we already hinted at future plans here.

AI’s Wearable Future Expands with New Patent filing - Humane further reveals how its groundbreaking AI wearable will use lasers, audio, and sensors to deliver messaging, wayfinding + more via a “hand-projected home page.”

EU: Train on Our HPCs, Play by Our Rules - The EU is unlocking its high-performance supercomputers for AI startups as long as they adhere to the recently passed voluntary AI rules.

Bridging the Data Gap - Google Data Commons unlocks the power of public data with an Intuitive GenAI Interface so users can intuitively query this vast open-source reservoir.

˚The hottest thing in tech this week

The #2 Most-Used AI App That You Haven’t Heard Of

We all know ChatGPT is the king on web and app, but the #2 IOS and Android app may surprise you. It isn’t Bard, Midjourney or ClaudeAI. It’s Character.ai, a startup enabling users to design their own customized AI character or interact with a range of preset AI friends — from Einstein to a counsellor and even your favorite video game characters.

Recent data shows the app has exploded since its launch in May with app store 1.5M downloads in its first week alone and 4.2M monthly active mobile users in the U.S. closing on ChatGPT's nearly 6M and showing they are keeping users engaged.

How did they do it?

This success has a lot to do with the “alive feel” of its immersive character- and narrative-based approach, and a mobile-first approach which appeals to young audiences (60% of its audience is 18-24 vs. only 27% for ChatGPT.) Character.AI’s real killer feature has surprisingly turned out to be its community and crowd-sourced model with custom AI chatbots quietly becoming the next big thing in fandom. This has attracted gamers, cyberpunks and metaverse enthusiasts, with low barriers to creation of your own Fan bots, meaning many of the characters are created from scratch by the users.

Add to that Industry OG founder talent in two AI experts who led the Google team that built LaMDA. Character.ai appears to have plenty of runway left to further grow its user base, given their massive $150M Series A in March led by Andreessen Horowitz valuing it at $1B and attracting investment from former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, Elad Gil, A Capital and SV Angel.

Do you think Character.ai can maintain this growth and engagement rate?

News Bytes

• NASA plans to use AI to investigate unidentified aerial phenomena

• Day-1 traffic crashes Stable Audio 1st-ever public-use text-to-audio app

• US AI Safety Commitment Gains 8 new members incl Adobe, IBM, Nvidia

Deals We’re Watching

Founders to Watch and Opportunities to Catch

Closed Deals:

VideoAmp’s Series G Success - The firm providing measurement, data and software for the advertising market raised $150M on the back of wide adoption delivering billions in advertising spend on 23/24 campaigns already.

EquipmentShare Rakes In More - Construction Tech’s next big thing added $150M, (totalling $440M in Two Years) to expand its “T3” platform for fleet management, telematics, and an equipment marketplace.

Sephora Welcomes AI Skincare StartUp - Proven launched in Sephora in Jan offering a bespoke skincare journey with interactive video and a Skin Genome Quiz. A $12.2M Series A by NewH2 will accelerate the US Sephora rollout.

AI-Powered Human PAs - Duckbill snaps up $25M in a Series A round led by Forerunner to power its unique blend of AI-assisted human “Co-pilots” providing online assistance. The product is already beta-tested and mass-market ready.

Moment to Shine - Startup Moment seized $17M in a Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz to make bond trading as easy as stock trading.

Companies to Watch:

Another Brick in The Wall - Data analytics and AI platform Databricks stacked on a $500M Series I at a $43B valuation (the 8th highest valuation globally) led by T. Rowe Price with Nvidia, Morgan Stanley, a16z, Fidelity and Tiger Global.

New Generation AI Drugs - Generate is the latest AI drug discovery startup to raise a massive sum, with a $273M Series C backed by Amgen and Nvidia's VC arm. The company refined their approach through the Moderna incubator.

“Multi-Terabit-Per-Sec Data” - Enfabrica is building networking chips for data centers with game-changing tech aiming to reduce AI compute bottlenecks. A $125M Series B from Nvidia and others gives them a $148M war-chest.

“Lighter and Greener” EV Batteries - Lyten’s tech requires less lithium and also has a hand in IoT Tech, which explains smart home-tech savvy Honeywell backing a recent $200M Series B to build a new San Jose factory.

BCG Spinoff Startup - CO2 AI launched an Industry-Leading C02 emission tracking tool in 2020, and already has major companies like ATG onboard. A new $12M injection from BCG and others will help US expansion.

Open Deals:

Together With AI - Together, an AI startup providing devs with AI-ready compute and software, is reportedly in talks to raise up to $60M in its third round in nine months. Together is projecting ~$10M in ARR from about 20 customers

Denodo’s Massive Data Mgmt Deal - TPG Growth is set to pump $336M into Denodo's Series B aiming to supercharge the data management heavyweight. With a 50 Net Promoter Score and many high-profile clients, Denodo looks well poised.

Tools

SciSummary - uses GPT models to summarize scientific articles and research papers.

Stable Audio - a text-to-audio generation tool enabling custom-length music creation using the latest audio diffusion models.

If you have a deal or company that you would like to host on our next issue, drop us a line at @ [email protected].

Thanks for connecting with us.

The Tech Buzz Team