TECH IN THE NEWS

“The DeFiant Ones” - Former Pres. Trump plans to launch "World Liberty Financial," a DeFi protocol aiming to “dismantle banking barriers” with RWA and metaverse-related ventures. Reports suggest it has a 70% insider token allocation.

Demand to Double - AI is predicted to boost copper demand by over 70% by 2050 amidst an existing global supply shortage.

Closing Loophole - The Biden admin is aiming to close the “de minimis” import duty loophole that enables Temu and Shein shopping services to flourish in the US.

MicroStrategy - The business intelligence firm bought approximately $1.11b of Bitcoin, raising its total holdings to 1.2% of total BTC supply.

75 Bps Cuts? - A trio of Dem Senators, Warren, Whitehouse and Hickenlooper called on the Federal Reserve chair Powell to cut interest rates by 75 Basis Points.

COMPANIES TO WATCH

Enterprise AI Search - Palo Alto AI search startup Glean raised a $260M+ Series E at $4.6b led by Altimeter and DST, with SoftBank, IVP, Lightspeed and Sequoia.

Spatial Intelligence AI - “Godmother of AI” Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs “spatial intelligence” company launched today, aiming to develop AI models to help understand and generate 3D environments.

Huma Finance - The San Francisco “payment financing” (PayFi) network raised a $38M round led by Distributed Global, with İşbank’s TIBAS, Hashkey and more.

The Tech Buzz Virtual HQ

Just a reminder that we now have a high-fidelity, 3D Virtual Headquarters space in VHQ, to better connect you with companies, investors, talent, and each other. We got a great response to the last message so we are putting it on your radar again.

It's an immersive and engaging experience; possibly the future of online 3D spatial internet communication (goodbye Zoom)!

In the TechBuzz HQ you can network, do business, pitch/be pitched, and recruit.

We have an expansive Atrium for networking, private 1-on-1 spaces, a 25-person board room, and even a massive 1000 person Auditorium for conferences and events

We’ll hold our own events soon: pitch days, job fairs, etc. but you can too. The space is yours as well! For now, check it out and share any ideas you have for the space.

Take a peek inside!

THE HOTTEST THING IN TECH
Understanding AI Agents

AI Agents tech is all the rage this week. We have had some major announcements from Microsoft about its new Copilot AI Agents feature, Salesforce and Slack are also all in on the tech. And a couple of interesting new startups have raised money. So let’s try to understand where we are at in the progression of AI agents and how you can take advantage of the tech now, or in the future.

The Copilots » AI Agents Pipeline

AI agents are a subset of the AI boom that has been attracting a lot of investor and technologist attention. Many of the greatest minds in tech and a lot of capital are being put to work on solving how we can enable AI to both augment, and eventually replace humans in various online tasks.

Andreessen Horowitz just published an article predicting the evolution of AI assistants from "copilots" to "AI agents" in white-collar professional roles. The authors predict that as agentic AI tech’s reasoning capability improves, we will likely see more partially or fully autonomous AI agents capable of executing complex workflows independently. AI agents will increasingly take on significant portions of white-collar work. This would transform industries like law, medicine, and software development, leaving humans to focus more on high-level strategy and oversight.

Where Are We?

Currently, we are probably on the verge between the copilot and true agent stage, with AI coding and customer service being the two sectors seeing most progress so far. AI agent tools like Cognition’s Devin or Anysphere’s Cursor have gained significant traction in the coding field. The recent development in reasoning by OpenAI’s o1 model is a significant step on this path. Cognition just tested Devin on o1, showing improved reasoning and error diagnosis, more effective analysis, backtracking, and less hallucinations when compared with GPT-4o.

A Surge in Agents Activity

This week Microsoft announced it’s introducing new "Copilot Agents" in its Office 365 Copilot product. This feature allows users to automate business processes, with a new agent builder feature to help users create custom agents within BizChat and SharePoint. It’s unclear how advanced these “agents” are currently, but assuming they are using o1 also, they are likely significantly better than the previous generation of Microsoft copilots, although reportedly still quite slow at this stage.

Salesforce under Marc Benioff is also going all in on AI agents, aiming to be a place where humans can communicate with a growing array of bots and agents. Last week it announced its own suite of Agentforce Agents that it sees as acting autonomously rather than simply as a co-pilot. And this week it has announced it will also support agents from Adobe, Anthropic, Cohere, Perplexity, Writer and others, in addition to these. Its subsidiary chat app Slack will also let users add these third party agents and other AI tools like transcribing to streamline work tasks.

One Slight Problem, Marc

Benioff revealed yesterday that a conversation with Steve Jobs significantly influenced the development of Agentforce, which is inspired by Jobs' approach to product development. The success of Agentforce will depend on its ability to deliver value while maintaining the company's “customer-centric ethos”.

Do customers even want customer service bots? Not at all. A new survey from Gartner found that people don't just dislike the idea of AI being used in customer service — they're actively repulsed by it. Does it matter? Probably not. We didn’t want offshore call centres, multi-hour-phone queues, or byzantine phone tree systems but we got them anyway. Surely it can’t be worse than that right? Right? And there is a chance Agents will offer far better service, while freeing up enterprise workers from repetitive tasks and enabling them to focus their energies more productively.

How to Use AI Agents

The options at this stage are to use the preset bots on offer from big tech services, or one of the many more niche focused agents by startups. Which makes more sense will likely depend on the outcome you’re looking for and how big the budget is.

New AI Agent Startups

New AI Agent startups on the scene include these two recent raises:

• 11x.ai, a startup specializing in "automated digital workers" to handle repetitive tasks. It raised a $24M Series A round led by Benchmark yesterday and is already approaching $10M ARR.

• Supermaven, an AI coding assistant co-founded by Jacob Jackson, has raised $12M from the likes of OpenAI and Perplexity co-founders. It has over 35,000 developers using the service and has hit $1M ARR.

FOR INVESTORS
Open Deals

Request an intro to founders - [email protected]

1. 🔥⏱️ Robotics for Agricultural Efficiency - Pittsburgh - Built & deployed robotic hardware for the largest U.S. tree nurseries, reducing costs and increasing efficiency by 50x. Hardware and AI data layer. Beginning to scale globally. Post-revenue, at capacity. (Seed+)
   

2. 🔥⏱️ Quant Trading Software Company - New Jersey - Large-scale automated day-trading algorithm designed for volatile U.S. equity markets. Profitable through extensive backtesting and live simulation. Seeking equity investment for software company.

3. Cricket for the Modern World - India - Physical and virtual ecosystem fostering cricket experiences for enthusiasts and upcoming pros. Data-driven, locally proven, globally scaling. (Seed)

🔥 — hot deal!
⏱️ — leaving soon.

FOR EMPLOYERS
Job Candidates

Request an intro to candidates - [email protected].

1. Struck Capital Venture Associate, ex-West2East (Russell Wilson) Director of Special Projects, ex-Phoenix Holdings Investment Associate. Harvard BA. Vietnamese pro basketball player.

2. Lockheed Martin Software Engineer, ex-Rutgers Junior Full Stack Developer. Secret clearance. Expertise in C++, PHP, SQL. Rutgers BA in Computer Science.

TRENDING TOOLS AND BUZZY TECH
Tools

Widfire Drones - AI-piloted drone swarms detect and fight wildfires.

“g1” - AI system using Llama-3.1 on Groq hardware matches OpenAI’s o1 model.

Hume - EVI 2, voice-to-voice foundation model trained for emotional intelligence.

Agent One – Create and setup AI Agents for customer support in just minutes.

Tech

SpaceX - Military standard laser communication between satellites.

DeepMind - Two new AI systems advance robot dexterity, can tie shoelaces.

US Army - Mid-air ‘drone tethering” recharging tech could keep drones in air.

West Virginia U. - Disarming Pancreatic Cancer with enzyme inhibitors.

🚨TECH BUZZ ANNOUNCEMENT:

We are making some changes — Our Closed Deals, Companies to Watch, and Funding Buzz sections will now live in a separate email sent weekly on Monday wrapping up the top deals from the previous week.

Please get in touch with feedback on this change and any other suggestions as to what you would like us to feature more of.