AI Funding Weekly - August 5th 2023

AI Funding News, delivered fresh weekly(ish)

Hello, happy Saturday, and welcome back to AI Funding Weekly. Another week has gone by and as usual, a lot has happened in the world of AI.

This week I watched a fascinating video produced by Harvard Business Review that I thought really cut to the core of how AI is going to change the world, and it’s not in the way some people think.

I’ve heard far too many people share concerns about AI replacing humans. While you can watch enough movies and think this might happen, this is not the way I think things are going to play out - sorry Terminator fans.

When I hear people say this I usually say - it’s not AI itself that is going to replace humans, it’s humans using AI that will replace those who don’t. Crazy enough, it looks like I’m not the only person who thinks this way as Harvard Business Review released a great video on topic this week, aptly titled - AI Won’t Replace Humans — But Humans With AI Will Replace Humans Without AI.

I’d give this one a watch, it will definitely get the gears turning. Okay, now time for the good stuff - let’s dive into the always exciting world of AI funding and talk about what startups added more gas to the rocket this week!

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Akkio - $15M Series A

This one is near and dear to me as it’s founded by some of my old (and insanely bright) co-workers from Sonos. What Akkio is doing is incredibly powerful, and the moment I heard about it I thought - this is going to be big, so it was exciting to see them get a nice big chunk of funding this week.

So what does Akkio do? The way I’ve always described it to people (and I’m not sure if this is marketing approved by them but I’ll fly with it) is - Akkio is democratizing AI so that you don’t have to be a programmer to leverage all that AI can offer.

In short, Akkio has built a no-code platform that allows business analysts to leverage AI without pulling in a data scientist. Honestly, I think this is huge and the beginning of a foundational change where using AI doesn’t necessarily mean having deep Python chops or dreaming in SciKit Learn.

Here’s a quote from Akkio’s CEO, Abe Parangi on the new funding:

“This investment allows us to scale and advance our platform so business analysts can leverage AI technologies to work faster, unlock new insights, and make a bigger impact for their organization,” (Source - VentureBeat)

This round was led by Bain Capital Ventures and Pandome, Inc. Congrats to the whole team - honestly seeing this news made my week!

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Tenstorrent - $100M

It’s no secret that AI chips are in high demand, okay that’s an understatement, nobody can product them fast enough. The market is growing so fast that McKinsey actually predicted that 20% of the entire, yes entire, $450B semiconductor market is going to be AI chips by 2025.

So then it should come as no surprise that Tenstorrent, an AI hardware startup led by Jim Keller, raised a whopping $100M co-led by Hyundai and Samsung.

If you don’t know who Jim Keller here - let’s pause for a small Morgan geeking out at one of his heroes break. Jim is a legend in the semiconductor space, he worked at both AMD and Apple designing the AMD K8 architecture and the Apple A4/A5 processor, oh and he also co-authored the x86-64 instruction set. Okay, end geek out session.

Now onto what Tenstorrent does. Jim’s new company sells AI processors and licenses AI software solutions and IP around RISC-V. And based on this new funding round it’s safe to say car makers like Hyundai already have some nice use-cases lined up for these processors.

One really curious thing about this round is that it is a debt round raised as a convertible note. It’s pretty rare to see convertible notes coupled with a round this size and I’m still doing some digging to understand the logic behind this one as it’s a bit of a head-scratcher.

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GoStudent - $95M

Already a juggernaut in the online tutoring space, GoStudent locked in another $95M in funding bringing their total funding to over $686M. And this next round is aimed at moving in two very interesting and relevant directions - VR and AI.

The edtech unicorn (which has attained an estimated €3 billion valuation) says the raise will be used to bring “enhanced hybrid learning solutions to the DACH region.” In plain English, that means more online and offline educational support and an expansion of the use of its GoVR — GoStudent’s newly launched virtual reality language learning platform. (Source - TechCrunch)

I personally think that VR is going to see mass adoption over the next five years and seeing companies like GoStudent put real focus on this will only help to accelerate the trend. Of course, leveraging AI in the tutoring space is a no-brainer, there is so much opportunity to personalize learning in new and exciting ways using AI.

Another great example of AI used for good, and a company with a strong background in really leaning into new technology, the perfect combo in my opinion.

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As always, thanks for reading and I’ll see you next week - same time(ish) same bat-channel.