Each week we will share the latest artificial intelligence news and insights, curated for professionals, board members, and entrepreneurs, as we learn to navigate together the opportunities and threats arising from the evolution of AI and technology.
This week in AI
Welcome to AI Forum’s weekly report where we share AI news and insights, curated for students, practitioners, executives and entrepreneurs.
In this week’s report, we focus on a bumper week for AI deal making, as the volume of funding being directed into AI companies defies the ongoing volatility in the banking system – with the once mighty Credit Suisse, at one time one of the most revered tech analyst firms, being sold to UBS for three point two five billion US Dollars over the weekend.
The appetite of investors including Spark Capital and General Catalyst to invest large tickets in fast growth AI firms building “Foundation Models”, such as Adept AI, is all the more remarkable in the wake of the failure of Silicon Valley Bank, as reported last week.
AI Funding News
We start with Adept – based in San Francisco, California, USA – who raised a staggering three hundred million US Dollars on a pre-money valuation of six hundred and fifty million US Dollars.
It was only twelve months ago that the company raised sixty five million US Dollars in Series A.
Also noteworthy, the firm has twenty five employees, with this new funding partly designed to ramp up the workforce as the firm looks to scale.
Adept has a minimum viable product (called ACT-1) that is working on the problem of how people use their computers. From Adept’s blog announcing the deal,
”At Adept, we’re completely reimagining the way that you interact with your computer. We believe that AI systems should be built with users at the center — our vision is one where machines work together with people in the driver’s seat: discovering new solutions, enabling more informed decisions, and giving us more time for the work we love.
Think about Adept as an AI teammate or a collaborative co-pilot that can supercharge your capabilities on any software tool or API in the world. We’re building a future in which you can tell your computer to do something in your own words and then just watch it happen on your screen.”
We will report back on progress as Adept’s Foundation Model matures and competitors such as Inflection, co-founded by LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman, reveal their product lines.
Apprentice is a Jersey City, New Jersey, USA based Health Tech firm that has built an enterprise scale platform to help pharma companies “get from drug discovery to patient delivery faster”.
Their Series C Round raised sixty five million US Dollars and was led by Iconiq Capital along with Insight Partners and Alkeon Capital.
From their website,
“Apprentice is the only system that can quickly deliver on the Pharma 4.0 promise, offering a flexible system that can be easily deployed across all manufacturing processes.
From small and large molecule to cell and gene therapy, we use innovative technology to increase an organization’s speed to market and improve reliability. Unlike traditional Manufacturing Execution Systems and Electronic Batch Systems, Apprentice is easy to use.
We make teams mobile and your data intelligent. Apprentice bridges the gap between paper and digital, and uses artificial intelligence, machine learning and augmented reality to make your manufacturing smart.”
Numbers Station raised twelve point five million US dollars in Series A led by Madrona, with over four hundred investments for companies mostly from the Pacific North West.
The firm is another company focused on developing a proprietary Foundation Model, in this case focused on data. From their Press Release,
“Numbers Station’s approach to bringing foundation models into th modern data stack resonates with long-time industry experts who have wrestled with extracting insights from messy data for decades. “Numbers Station is solving some of the biggest challenges that have existed in the data industry for decades. Their platform and underlying AI technology is ushering in a fundamental paradigm shift for the future of work on the modern data stack,” said former Tableau CEO Mark Nelson.”
Graft has an ambitious vision, as described on their website to become “the Foundation for Modern AI”
They firm raised fourteen point five million US Dollars in a venture round, registered with the SEC on the 14th March 2023.
Led by a powerful team of alumni from Slack, Netflix and Amazon, the firm explains the background to the name on their website,
“Graft is named, in part, because you can graft it onto the side of any organization and use it in tandem with your existing data or machine learning stack. Over time, you may find that Graft is sufficient and you can decommission the old tools, but you can do so at your leisure”
The firm is early stage but definitely one to watch.
HealthPlix is a Digital Health Platform based in the thriving tech hub of Bangalore, Karnataka state, India. The firm raised twenty million US Dollars in Series C, topped up with two million US Dollars in debt and was supported by local VC firm Avataar Ventures.
The firm has an impressive scale servicing over ten thousand doctors in three hundred and seventy cities in India.
The firm uses Artificial Intelligence to increase the productivity of their widely used Electronic Medical Records platform and is the recipient of numerous awards including Startup of the Year in 2022, awarded by the Confederation of Indian Industry.
That’s all for this week. If you want to publish your news and Press Releases, email our news desk by Close of Business Thursday each week on newsdesk@ai-forum.com and to stay informed, visit our website ai-forum.com and click to subscribe.
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