AI Funding Weekly - Issue #12

The writers strike would be over, if it wasn't for AI

The writers strike, which is approaching the six month mark looks like it would be over, if it weren’t for concerns around AI, which seem to be the last sticking point in the negotiations. Saturday marked the fourth day of negotiations and it sounds like no forward progress was made.

While AI is a hot topic for Hollywood today, I think just about every industry is going to have it’s own challenges as it looks deeper into how AI adoption plays out over time.

The reality is, this is a foundational shift, and with all foundational shifts comes confusion, concerns, and general pushback from people who like things just the way they are. Of course change is inevitable, but implementing change the right way is a challenging process.

What I think is so impactful about the writers strike is that the decisions that are made here will likely have implications on a multitude of other industries that will grapple with similar issues. Big Hollywood studios aren’t that dissimilar from big record studios or big game studios, and the decisions made over the next couple of days (or weeks) - will likely show us all a bit of what’s to come.

Like so many people I really hope the writers and actors end up with something that values all of the hard work they put into their craft. I personally don’t think AI will ever be able to replace human writers or actors, but I do think it will be able to supplement them both and add efficiencies, if used in the right ways.

And on that note, let’s talk about some interesting AI startups with fresh funding this week.

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Writer - $100M Series B

This felt like the most obvious startup to write about first given my topic this week. Writer, a San Francisco based startup has a vision of helping companies build AI into all of your business processes.

With three core pillars - create, analyze, and govern, Writer allows companies to LLMs, NLP, and ML leveraging a company’s own unique data. And yes, I know like this sounds like three buzzy acronyms tossed together but Writer isn’t a some fly-by-night startup - they’re used by major Enterprises like Vanguard and Accenture and back by some serious VCs.

This monster Series B round was led by Iconic Growth, the firm backing companies like Snowflake and DataDog.

So what makes Writer so different from other companies in the space?

While the B2B software market has for the last six months been absolutely inundated with new generative AI tools and applications — many of them making use of large language models (LLMs) such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Meta Platforms’ Llama 2 — Writer aims to stand out with its in-house AI models. (Source - VentureBeat)

Using its own models and focusing on segmentation of data and deep security means that companies that won’t touch more public LLMs like ChatGPT and don’t quite have the trust-factor with Meta are likely to be much more comfortable with their offering.

. . .

Motherduck - $53M Series B

When it comes to great investors, Felicis Ventures has always been high on my list so when I saw they led a round in the AI space this week I had to cover it. And it’s no surprise the company, Motherduck, is doing some incredibly cool things.

So what does Motherduck do?

In one sentence - they offer a serverless analytics platform. In more sentences:

Hardware has advanced a lot in the last 10 years, but we’re still using complicated distributed data processing circa 2005. MotherDuck provides a simplified, performant and efficient data warehouse based on the lightweight DuckDB engine for the 95% of data warehouses that don’t need petabyte scale.

It’s an over-engineering problem that so many companies, big and small toil over. While you could build out an entire end-to-end system for analytics, you really shouldn’t have to any more and Motherduck is providing just what most companies need. The result is a powerful solution that doesn’t require a team of DevOps engineers to run it, and is oh-so-slick when it comes to tooling.

I won’t geek out much more but suffice it to say, I think they’re spot on when they say 95% of data warehouses are their target market, and yes - that’s a very big market.

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Gizmo - $3.5M Seed

And of course I can’t only cover big monster $50M+ rounds because then I’d miss some gems that are just starting to show the world what they can do.

I’m a big believer than AI is going to have a profound impact on the education space so this week Gizmo caught my eye - they’re an AI learning startup that uses gamified quizzes to keep people engaged.

“Memory is critical for all forms of learning, but people forget 90% of what they learn,” said Petros Christodoulou, co-founder and CEO of Gizmo. “Generative AI is enabling us to create new ways to help people remember everything they learn in a fun and engaging way and that is why we started Gizmo.” (Source - TechCrunch)

As someone who learned to type with “Reader Rabbit,” and got excited about math with, you guessed it - “Math Rabbit,” I think gamification is absolutely the way to go when it comes to making educational solutions more fun and engaging. Spice this up with some AI and I think we’re going to be hearing a lot more about Gizmo over the next few years.

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And that’s a wrap, as always, thanks for reading and tell all your friends about this Substack. I write this for free so if you want to give back, give it a share on LinkedIn, X, or whatever social network you use. Spread the word and let’s help more people discover the awesome startups that just got some fresh wind in their sails ⛵

Morgan Linton