The $99 Limitless AI Pendant

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∆ Tech in the News

Criminalizing Explicit Deepfakes - England & Wales are amending a Bill before parliament to include a ban on sexually explicit AI deepfakes, while a French team launches a controversial nude deepfake-generating camera.

Opening Japan - OpenAI is expanding into Asia with a new Tokyo hub headed by Tadao Nagasaki (former Amazon Web Services leader).

"Reorganize and Streamline“ - Elon Musk announced that Tesla will lay off over 10% of its 140,000-person workforce "for the next phase of growth."

Hong Kong ETFs - Regulators approved the key Asian financial hub's first spot Bitcoin and Ether ETFs which could receive large inflows from mainland China.

Breakthrough Prize 2024 - Demis Hassabis’ research at Deepmind into protein structures has gained him a $3M award from the group founded by tech pioneers including Sergey Brin, Priscilla Chan, and Mark Zuckerberg.

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The Hottest Thing in Tech this Week

New $99 Wearable AI Pendant From Limitless

Limitless, a $99 wearable personalized AI device “powered by what you’ve seen, said, or heard” is making waves today with its’ buzzy reveal. It aims to “augment human intelligence without replacing it” by giving us back the ability to focus on one task at a time. The Limitless pendant and $20/mth app logs everything you do online or in real life, parses the info, and helps you search, sort, and interact with all that history however you want to.

Limitless is a new product from CEO Dan Siroker and a full rebrand of startup Rewind, which launched its first app in 2022, without a wearable and running on local computers rather than in the cloud. Limitless builds on this vision to record all your interactions to the cloud via the clip-on wearable and all your devices.

This comes after Humane’s AI Pin launch last week to pretty poor reviews. Siroker differentiates Limitless from Humane by saying that its ambitions are more narrowly focused, currently only on making meetings a joy. Limitless aims to do this by preparing you for meetings, transcribing, and giving you real-time notes and summaries afterwards. You can also enable AI Agent access to your emails, calendar, and productivity apps like Notion or Slack like Rabbit1.

Data Privacy Breakthroughs?

Limitless and Rewind have made a major breakthrough in privacy beyond the local storage approach of Rewind, with two major privacy announcements:

1. “Consent Mode” - In consent mode, Limitless can only record people who have verbally given consent, using seamless AI voice recognition.

2. “The Confidential Cloud” - all your data is stored in a decrypted cloud which neither Limitless, your employer, or the Government can access.

This AI wearable segment is heating up and looks set to be a huge driver of AI innovation. Siroker says Limitless also plans to expand to include "what you've seen" over time, which could mean integration with smart glasses or other camera devices. Siroker says Limitless plans to expand its scope only once it has nailed the current focus area of meetings. This strategy is wise given the massive scale of the problem, but the scope for improving our lives is truly limitless…

Deals We’re Watching

Founders to Watch and Opportunities to Catch

Open Deals:

Looking to invest? Let us know if you want a warm intro —> [email protected]

1. Nanocomposite materials for Robotics - Alb., NM - Creating resilient nanocomposite materials for extreme environments using precision machining and robotics. Raised >$12M undiluted funding via federal government innovation R&D contracts. $3M in federal contract pipeline. (Seed)

2. Biometric Firearm Security - Colorado - Advanced safety through biometric technology. Millions in pre-orders. >$25M raised so far. (Series A)

Raising for your startup? Send us your Open Round —> [email protected]

Closed Deals:

Clinical-Stage Biotech - Deep Track Capital led a $158M Series B-2 round into California startup TORL BioTherapeutics backed by RA Capital, Goldman Sachs, Bristol Myers Squibb, and others.

Finance Ops - California accounting and finance operations startup FloQast closed a $100M Series E at $1.6B led by ICONIQ Growth.

DeFi-focused L1 - Caymans HQ’d Ethereum-compatible blockchain startup Berachain raised a $100M Series B backed by Polychain, Samsung Next, Hack VC, Animoca, and Hashkey Capital.

OpenAI Rival - San Fran AI startup Symbolica raised a $31M Series A led by Khosla to develop DL architectures to compete with OpenAI's transformer model starting with a coding assistant in 2025.

Cardboard Insulation - Buffalo building materials startup CleanFiber secured a $28M Series B and a $31.5M project financing facility for its Buffalo factory.

AI IP Mgmt - San Fran AI-powered patent management startup Patlytics raised a $4.5M seed from Google’s Gradient, 8VC, Tribe Capital & more.

Companies to Watch:

Digital Workspace - San Fran startup Coda provides a flexible work platform to 40k+ enterprises with 600+ integrations. A strategic partnership with Snowflake will sync its data cloud, launch AI tools for knowledge workers and add an undisclosed sum to its’ $240M previously raised.

The Funding Buzz

[OPEN FUND] Asymmetric Capital Partners - Former Catalant co-CEO’s VC firm is targeting $125M for its second fund to back pre-seed software, marketplaces, health IT, and fintech startups.

[OPEN FUND]: Athena Capital - Mass. VC firm targets $500M for its first growth-equity fund to invest in late-stage health, AI, ML and quantum computing.

Underscore VC - The Boston VC firm closed its third fund with $58M committed intending to back early-stage startups including in the AI sector.

Human Ventures - The New York firm approaches $50M for its fund II focused primarily on the “human needs economy” and “the attention economy”.

Trending Tools and Buzzy Tech

Tools

OnePlus / Oppo -  Incorporating Google AI into their phones.

Grok 1.5 - Vision processes docs, charts etc with real-world understanding.

Adobe - $4.99/mth Acrobat AI assistant reads and gleans insights from PDFs.

Tech

Google - Infini-attention gives LLMs infinite context with the same compute.

DeepMind / Cambridge - Mini humanoid robots learn to play soccer.

Superfast Drone - Hypersonic 'rotating detonation rocket engine' trialled

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