Cisco Launches $1B AI Fund, Nvidia Reaches $3T Market Cap, and Musk Leaves Tesla Without AI Chips
Artificial Intelligence news, week 23/2024
Happy Saturday everyone!
I'm Rubén Colomer, GP at Next Tier Ventures and this is AI Weekly Digest, a weekly roundup of the latest news, funding rounds, tools, interesting reads, events, and jobs related to Artificial Intelligence.
News 🗞️📰
Cisco Announces New $1 Billion AI Investment Fund to Drive Strategic Innovation and Industry Leadership.
AI chipmaker Nvidia soars to $3T market cap to pass Apple as second-most valuable in the world.
Elon Musk Leaves Tesla Without AI Chips, Redirects Nvidia Orders to xAI and Social Media Platform X, claiming ‘they would have just sat in a warehouse’
Stability AI is opening up its generative AI efforts for audio today with the release of Stable Audio Open 1.0.
AMD announced its new artificial intelligence chips for everything, ramping up its challenge to the runaway market leader Nvidia.
AI apocalypse? ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity all went down at the same time
Mistral AI Introduces Model Customization on La Plateforme for Enhanced Performance and Cost-Efficiency
Funding 💼💸
Alinia AI, a Spanish alignment platform that enables companies to safely and controlled deploy generative AI, guided by their policies and business, has raised $2.4 million in Pre-Seed funding led by Speedinvest and Precursor with participation from KFund and notable angels.
Greptile raises $4M to build an AI-fueled code base expert. The round was led by Initialized Capital with participation from various prominent industry angels.
Twelve Labs, the multimodal AI that understands videos like humans, raises $50 Million Series co-led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA) and NVIDIA's NVentures.
Cartwheel, a NYC-based provider of a generative automation platform, raised $5.6M in Seed funding led by Accel, with participation from Khosla Ventures, Human Ventures, Heretic VC, MVP Ventures, Correlation Ventures, Pelion VC, and angel investors, including Drew Houston, Akshay Kothari, Amjad Masad, and Kyle Parrish.
Storyblok, a startup out of Linz, Austria, that provides a content management system (CMS) for organizations built around the “headless” concept, has closed a Series C round of $80 million led by Brighton Park Capital.
Signapse, a generative AI Sign Language translation software company, announced a new seed funding round of £2 million with £1.5 million from investors and £500k from the UK Government.
Barcelona-based data analytics startup Mitiga has raised an €8M extension to its Series A funding in a round led by Elaia. Kibo Ventures, CREAS Impacto and others also invested in the round
Eko Health, a leader in AI-powered early detection of heart and lung diseases, announced today a successful Series D financing round of $41 million led by ARTIS Ventures, Highland Capital Partners, NTTVC, and Questa Capital.
Spiideo, a Swedish firm that makes AI-powered video and analytics software used by teams in the NBA, NHL and English Premier League, secured a $20 million venture capital investment from a group led by Cipio Partners and including Mathias Kamprad, the billionaire son of the founder of retail giant Ikea.
M&A 💰
Sirion Labs, a specialist in contracts — is acquiring another enterprise AI pioneer, Eigen Technologies, which focuses on parsing and extracting insights and data from documents in verticals like insurance, finance and law.
Cloudera acquires Verta to bring some AI chops to its data platform
Databricks, the data an AI Company acquired Tabular, which makes data management software. The Wall Street Journal put the price at $1 billion to $2 billion.
Interesting Reads 💡🤔
The state of AI in early 2024 (McKinsey): Gen AI adoption spikes and starts to generate value
Check the Numbers: 7 Vital AI Startup Funding Statistics in 2024
Top 12 AI Tools for Financial Analysts: 2024 Edition
The future of foundation models is closed-source. If the centralizing forces of data and compute hold, open and closed-source AI cannot both dominate long-term
AI-Powered LORIS: Advancing Cancer Treatment Predictions. Researchers introduced LORIS, an AI-based logistic regression score, to enhance predictions of patient responses to immune checkpoint blockade (ICB) in cancer treatment
Tech 🤖💻
Transformers are SSMs: Generalized Models and Efficient Algorithms Through Structured State Space Duality. Mamba-2, a novel architecture leveraging the duality between structured state-space models (SSMs) and Transformers.
Google Research: Heuristics on the high seas: Mathematical optimization for cargo ships
LlamaCare: A Large Medical Language Model for Enhancing Healthcare Knowledge Sharing
Tools 🧰🛠️
Webtap.ai: Web scraping using AI, without limits. Get data from any website using only natural language queries.
Kroolo is an AI-powered productivity management platform that helps teams and individuals manage projects, tasks, documents, goals (OKRs), and team collaborations
LinkedCRM is your top AI assistant, the sales GPT on LinkedIn
Fibery is a product discovery and development platform that helps teams manage feedback, prioritize features, create detailed specifications, and build roadmaps
Descript's Underlord is an AI-powered assistant integrated into Descript for video and podcast editing. It automates tedious editing tasks, enhances audio quality, removes filler words, and generates video highlights
Formshare is a free AI-driven platform that allows users to create conversational online forms without any coding
Sound Effects by Eleven Labs is a new feature of the popular AI voice generator that allows you to create sound effects through prompts as well as musical loops
Falcon: Your Ai Scrum Manager
Events 🪩🎉
VDS (October 23-24) - Valencia, Spain *SPONSOR*
Valencia Digital Summit is a major technology event that gathers innovators, entrepreneurs, and business leaders from around the world to discuss the latest trends and advancements in digital technology. This year, artificial intelligence will be a fundamental focus, with dedicated sessions exploring its transformative impact across various industries. Attendees will have the opportunity to engage with AI experts, participate in workshops, and discover innovative AI applications that drive business growth and societal advancement.
You can get tickets here, become a sponsor or exhibitor, submit a call for speakers, or join the startup competition.
International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) (August 3-9) - Jeju-si, South Korea
A prominent event in the field of AI, bringing together researchers and professionals to discuss the latest advancements in artificial intelligence.EAI Africatek - EAI International Conference on Emerging Technologies for Developing Countries (August 6-8) - Ilorin, Nigeria
This conference focuses on sustainable development through the utilization of artificial intelligence and innovative technologies.International Conference on Intelligent Robotics and Control Engineering (August 7-9) - Xi'an, China
Explore advancements in robotics, artificial intelligence, and control engineering.Ai4 2024 (August 12-14) - Las Vegas, NV, USA
The world’s largest gathering of AI business leaders, featuring over 350 speakers and thousands of attendees.Generative AI Summit 2024 (August 13-15) - Sydney, Australia
Australia’s largest event dedicated to generative AI, offering case studies and practical examples on AI implementation.
AI Jobs 👩💻👨💻
PDO Project Manager (Meta) - Seattle, WA, US • $93k - $136k / year
PDO Project Manager (Meta) - Menlo Park, CA, US • $93k - $136k / year
PDO Project Manager (Meta) - Austin, TX, US • $93k - $136k / year
PDO Project Manager (Meta) - San Francisco, CA, US • $93k - $136k / year
PDO Project Manager (Meta) - Sunnyvale, CA, US • $93k - $136k / year
Security Engineer, Corporate Security (Grammarly) - Remote - $290k - $380k
We will have to wait and see. They don't seem to move too fast whereas AMZN, GOOG, NVDA, and the rest of the big guys are much more efficient. Keep up the good work. I find your weekly news useful.
CSCO seems to have lost a few steps. You think this will help?