AI Funding Weekly - July 13th 2023

Fresh AI funding news delivered weekly(ish)

If you read the news enough you might think San Francisco has become a ghost town devoid of startups. And while part of this narrative might be true, when it comes to AI startups, and funding for AI startups - San Francisco continues to dominate, big time.

So far this year half of the AI funding in the world - yes, not in the US but the world, went to San Francisco-based firms 🤯 If you want to read more about it, here ya go.

In other news, today China released a set of provisional rules for generative AI that includes a licensing regime for Chinese AI firms. Here’s a quick nugget of what these rules look like compliments of TechCrunch ⬇️

First and foremost, the rules require generative AI providers to adhere to core socialist values, which prohibit everything from pornography and terrorism to racism and content that threatens China’s national security.

Algorithms that can influence public opinions, the rules say, must be registered with the relevant authority. Generative AI service providers should also obtain an administrative license in accordance with the law, although the document doesn’t specify who is required to do that. (Source)

Ah, nothing like the creative wonder that comes from slapping on requirements that your cool new AI software has to “adhere to core socialist values” 🤷

Okay, there’s two tasty news nuggets for this week - now let’s get to the good stuff, AI funding news. Below are three companies that just got fresh funding this week that I think are pretty darn cool and well worth highlighting for you fine folks.

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Causaly - $60M Series B

Using AI for drug discovery is an area that I think we’ll continue to see a lot of growth in, and one of the companies leading the charge here is Causaly who brought in a nice $60M in fresh funding led by ICONIQ Growth.

Joining ICONIQ in this round are Index Ventures, Marathon Venture Capital, EBRD, Pentech Ventures, and Visionaries Club.

Causaly works across each stage of drug development and their CEO Yiannis Kiachopoulos said the company can bring the lengthy process of bringing a drug to market from 10-15 years to around six years.

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Resemble AI - $8M Series A

Voice cloning, it’s something we’re going to see AI used for more and more and while it might seem creepy in some ways, it’s a growing part of the AI world. One of the startups making waves in the AI voice cloning space is Resemble AI which announced their $8M Series A round led by Javelin Venture Partners, with participation from Craft Ventures and Ubiquity Ventures.

Resemble’s technology is already being used by some of the largest media companies in the world and it’s safe to say this new funding will continue to accelerate its usage.

But Resemble didn’t start in the media space, they actually started in the gaming space to help transfer voices into other languages and generate custom messages from voice actors. As a gamer this makes a lot of sense to me, and now I’m wondering if I’ve actually used Resemble myself without even knowing it 🤔

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Vellum.ai - $5M Seed

Remember the days where Seed rounds were $500,000? Well those days are long gone and while the news loves to talk about how VC funding is down, the reality is - Seed rounds are still nice and beefy, especially for startups in the AI space.

A good example here is Vellum, a startup from the most recent winter batch of Y Combinator. The company is just seven months old which makes the $5M round an impressive one so clearly they are doing something interesting. What is that interesting thing that they do you ask? Here’s the skinny from their site:

Bring LLM-powered features to production with tools for prompt engineering, semantic search, version control, quantitative testing, and performance monitoring. Compatible across all major LLM providers.

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And that’s a wrap - thanks for reading and I’ll see you next week! 🕺