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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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

• 8 Hot Gen AI Startups Helping Brands Finesse Their Creative

• 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

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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