AI Funding Weekly - Issue #11

The week of big moves by big companies in AI

The last week was a big one in the AI world with moves by two big companies, both making big news in the space. I guess in some ways it’s not fair to put both of these companies in the same category, one of them definitely has earned their stripes to be referred to as enormous.

Yes, the first company I’m talking about is Google, and this week they threw their hat in the ring, likely making it official - the AI race has arrived.

Google is gearing up to release its much-anticipated conversational AI system Gemini, setting the stage for an all-out AI battle royale with OpenAI's ChatGPT.

According to a report by The Information, Google has opened up testing of Gemini to select companies, indicating its consumer launch could be imminent. Gemini is a multimodal LLM, which means that it can natively receive inputs of different modalities —for example, text, image, audio, etc. (Source - Decrypt)

While we knew this was going to happen, I do think it makes the past week historic in some ways. For most of the year ChatGPT has been synonymous with LLMs and generative AI, going forward, we’re going to be associating LLMs with a lot more than ChatGPT, and Gemini, from Google is one I’d expect us to talk about a lot in the very near future.

The second big move by a big company is DataBricks which locked in its Series I round, which is a letter I don’t think I’ve seen assigned to a funding round before. At the point that you’re a startup, raising a round past Series F or G, I’m going to call you a big company. And while DataBricks isn’t nearly as big as Google, they’re big, and this week the took the number one spot for funding in the AI space.

But in this issue I’m not going to include DataBricks in the three companies I do like to shed light on earlier stage startups that might benefit more from being featured. And on that note - let’s get to the good stuff. Here’s three AI startups with fresh funding that caught my eye this week.

---

Series AI - $7.9M Seed

I’ll admit - I’m pretty biased with this first startup because it’s in the gaming space and I’m incredibly excited about the impact AI is having, and going to have in gaming. Series AI is off to a great start with a pretty healthy Seed round with investors like A16Z games in the mix.

So what does the company do? Series AI is building AI-powered game authoring tools - think building games with a lot less friction and significantly lower learning curve than you’d find with a more traditional engine like Unity or Unreal.

“We now know that in the hands of expert game makers, purpose-built generative AI editors can rapidly architect, shape and build new games and game worlds. A mature toolset will allow our team to explore brand new game systems, themes and mechanics in almost the same amount of time that it would take to describe them… We are building the Rho Engine, a game authoring platform that is designed for innovation. In the hands of our expert game makers, we believe this technology will enable new category leading products without the compromises inherent in traditional game development.” (Source - Pany Haritatos, Series AI’s CEO- VentureBeat)

I think that AI is going to enable an entirely new generation of creators, from non-developers building complex AI models to solve tricky business problems, to aspiring game makers, companies like Series AI are opening the door for creatives in a whole new way.

. . .

Learn.xyz - $3M Seed

As the name might have already tipped you off, Learn.xyz is using AI to help people learn, and learn about just about anything they want to powered by generative AI. The core feature the company offers right now is something called “curiosities” which creates custom slides and quiz questions based on any topic a user is interested in learning more about.

Since going into private beta over 60,000 curiosities have been created covering an incredible wide range of topics.

This round was led by Blockchange Ventures who had this to say about the company:

“Learn.xyz has showcased tremendous potential, reaching users across 150 countries even before its official launch. We envision rapid growth in this domain and are thrilled to be associated with the Learn.xyz team from these early stages.” (Source - CrowdFundInsider)

. . .

LastMile AI - $10M Seed

So this last company on my list is too cool not to cover because in a way, it has the potential to accelerate the AI adoption curve dramatically. I say this because LastMile AI is on a mission to help software engineers integrate generative AI into their apps.

The three founders of the LastMile worked together at Meta where they also worked on tooling for devs so this isn’t the first time the three have worked together on something like this.

“We want to empower builders by providing a new class of AI developer tools built for software engineers, not machine learning research scientists.” (Sarmad Qadri, CEO)

I think this point really hits the nail on the head. While there are tons of tools for Data Scientists and Machine Learning Engineers to build, test, and improve models, there hasn’t been as much work done on bringing other developers into the mix.

It’s no secret that with the rapid growth the generative AI space has seen, democratization of AI is just around the corner. And it looks to me like LastMile AI might be one of the companies that just helps make this happen, even faster.

The $10M Seed round was announced two days ago and is led by Google’s own Gradient Ventures.