Rise of The Robots

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∆ Tech in the News

AI Journalism - OpenAI struck a licensing deal with major news publisher Axel Springer (Politico’s parent), while The New York Times appointed a former co-founder of Quartz, to lead its AI team and explore AI tools.

Google Updates - Gemini is now available to create custom chatbots and apps in AI Studio, MedLM health sector models are unveiled in Beta, and Google Cloud partnered with Mistral AI to distribute its genAI language models.

"Emerging Vulnerability" - U.S. financial regulators the FSOC warned about the growing risk of AI to financial markets and their stability in its annual report.

Artificial Intel - Intel says dozens of PC makers are using its new AI-optimized processors for PCs and data centers to rival in-demand Nvidia and AMD chips.

"AI For Good & For All" - The U.S. is calling on the UN to mobilize global powers to support AI development in line with the UN Charter and Human rights.

Political Ads OK - X will allow political ads from candidates and parties and will expand its safety and elections team ahead of the 2024 presidential election.

˚The hottest thing in tech this week

Rise Of The Robots

This week, Telsa’s latest Optimus robot shocked the internet by handling an egg without breaking it and moving so fast as to fuel speculation the video was sped up… Spoiler it wasn’t. But this is just the tip of the iceberg as robotics development continues at a mind-bending pace.

A Swiss project just created a robotic arm that can be controlled by breath and eye movements. Verve Motion just raised $20M for its exo-suits that make you RoboCop so you can lift 100lbs+ with obvious heavy industry (and military) applications. Wendy's also just reported success with its FreshAI chatbot in drive-thru ordering improving efficiency. They aren’t alone, with McDonald’s already launching its first fully automated store. Robots always show up on time, don’t start unions and now, it seems are faster than humans at some tasks.

Then there are the military uses, with the US, China and Russia all investing heavily in autonomous weapons this year. The just passed defense budget is a record $886B which should buy a lot of drones. Robot dogs and AI inspectors will soon transform border security at home. Space is the final frontier, with Space Force-backed startup True Anomaly just raising $100M for autonomous satellites monitoring space threats.

But, it’s not all roses. Tesla just made the news yesterday with 2M+ cars being recalled to fix Autopilot safety controls. Cruise and Waymo are facing similar issues. So if we can’t even get cars right yet, what happens if/when robot dogs with machine guns go wrong? I guess we’re about to ‘f@#k around and find out’.

News Bytes

• Tesla recalls 2M+ cars via a free update to address Autopilot concerns.

• OpenAI admits it has a team working on ways to control AGI

• Elon Musk wants to open STEM-based schools and a university in Texas

• Modi launches an AI Mission to bring compute power to Indian startups

Deals We’re Watching

Founders to Watch and Opportunities to Catch

Open Deals:

Legal LLM - Legal AI software startup Harvey seeks $70M to $80M at ~$700M (4x its last valuation) with Sequoia and OpenAI Startup Fund participating.

High-end Pet Food - Pet food startup The Farmer's Dog is eyeing a raise of hundreds of millions led by JPMorgan next year at a valuation above its $2.5B.

Short Circuit - Circuit City, the former electronics retail chain, is looking to raise $25M according to SEC filings.

Gleaning Up - Glean, founded by ex-Google search engineers to help workers search internal data via OpenAI LLMs is raising at least $200M at a $2B PMV.

Salesforce-backed - Oleria helps companies manage employee access to apps and data and is now raising at least $30M per an SEC filing.

Closed Deals:

Gene Editing - Tome Biosciences raised $213M from a16z and others to develop a damage-free genetic editing technology.

“Renew Home” - Google spin-out Nest Renew merges with OhmConnect and lands $100M backing from Sidewalk Infrastructure Partners.

AI Healthcare Excellence - Twin Health helps patients manage lifestyle diseases like diabetes and obesity and raised a $50M Series C led by Temasek.

Zuper - The startup closed a $32M Series B led by FUSE to develop its automated field service workflows platform for SME and enterprises.

Biometric ID - Dynamic Labs is bringing FaceID and TouchID to web3 wallet design and raised a $16.5M Series A led by a16z with input from Founders Fund.

Data Models - AI startup Delphina raised $7.5M from Radical Ventures and Stanford’s Fei-Fei Li to seed its data-powered models in finance, retail and more.

Companies to Watch:

Mark Cuban-backed - Decentralized climate-tech startup dClimate signed an MoU with the Congo to store 100M tons of CO2 in its peatlands for ~$1B.

Pie In The Sky - Nvidia-powered drone startup Zipline has delivered 800k+ orders including pizza and meds and just added $330M at a $4B+ valuation.

True Anomaly - Menlo and Eclipse backed this Startup’s $100M Series B to add more autonomous satellites monitoring space threats. The U.S. Space Force previously funded the tech via a grant.

New Dimension - United Airlines and Microsoft's sustainability Funds both backed sustainable aviation fuel producer Dimensional Energy’s $20M Series A.

Mass Adoption - Sam Altman’s Biometric crypto Worldcoin is integrating with Minecraft, Reddit, Telegram, Shopify and Mercado Libre. 

The Coterie - An a16z-backed fintech startup selling software to help high-net-worth investors manage their VC fund investments.

The Funding Buzz

Google Ventures - Google’s VC firm hired GitLab’s Michael McBride as a GP to invest in early-stage open-source and AI startups focusing on enterprise clients.

LINE NEXT Corp - Secured $140M towards its new fund from a consortium led by Crescendo Equity Partners, the VC firm backed by Peter Thiel.

OpenAI Startup Fund - Cohort 2 of the Converge program is open to "exceptional engineers, designers, researchers, and product builders using AI to reimagine the world" with an initial equity investment of $1M for participants.

BoxGroup - The U.S. VC firm backing Ramp secured $425M for two new funds focusing on consumer enterprise, healthcare, financial, biotech, and climate.

Andreessen Horowitz - Plans to secure three early-stage funds focused on infrastructure, cloud software, AI, gaming, and “American dynamism.”

Balaji Srinivasan - Balaji launched a fund backed by Naval Ravikant, Brian Armstrong, and Fred Wilson focused on startup societies & network states.

Tools and Buzzy Tech

Google Pixel - Planning a new “Pixie” assistant for its Pixel devices.

Anthropic - Access Claude inside Google Sheets (API key required).

Snapchat+ - New AI image creation tools for subscribers

Meta - Testing its multimodal GPT-4V AI in Ray-Ban smart glasses

Midjourney - The New Alpha model launches image gen on the web

Auto Tech - Cars that change colors are the newest auto tech trend.

Curio - A new ChatGPT-powered plush smart-toy with voices including Grimes

Proton Mail - The encrypted email service finally has a desktop app.

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

Thanks for connecting with us.

The Tech Buzz Teamoogle-