AI Funding Weekly - July 20th 2023

Fresh AI funding news delivered weekly(ish)

Hello and welcome to the third issue of the AI Funding Weekly Substack. It feels good to get the momentum going here, this is starting to become a routine for me, I’m getting nice positive feedback, and the market is only getting hotter, for now.

And that’s what I want to highlight in my little soapbox commentary in the beginning of this issue. There has been a lot of talk lately about the chance that we’re in some ridiculously huge AI bubble, that’s going to pop and leave a lot of companies high and dry.

For me, and I’m no economist or finance guy (sorry, just a little old Engineer here), I think it’s silly that every time any market does well, some people jump in and call it a bubble. Sure, it could be a bubble, and yes - any time any market heads in a rocket ship trajectory, if you call it a bubble, you’ll be right sometimes.

I think this is a lot like playing the “don’t pass line” in craps. For those who don’t know the rules of craps, don’t worry - this is a simple one to explain. Essentially in craps, everyone is playing the same game. When you walk through a casino and see people at a craps table cheering and high-fiving, those are the majority who are all playing standard craps.

Occasionally, someone comes up to the craps table, a dour look on their face that signals - no high fives for me, and put a chip on the don’t pass bar. This bet means they think everyone is going to lose. When people are cheering and high-fiving, the don’t pass better is bummed, when everyone cries out in pain as a seven is rolled after a hot streak, the don’t pass better is glowing inside.

There are so many incredibly companies now doing so many innovative things in the AI space. Rather than talking about if it’s a bubble or not, why not celebrate all the world-changing innovation that is happening at this time in our lives?

Okay, off of my soapbox and onto three stellar startups with fresh funding ready to show the world what they can do 🚀

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Gushwork.ai raises $2.1M in pre-seed funding

Remember the days when $2M was a large Seed round? Not any more - now this is what we’re seeing at pre-seed and Gushwork just nabbed a nice chunk of change to kick things off thanks to a funding round led by Lightspeed Ventures.

Gushwork is looking at shaking up the world of hiring outsourced workers to do things like payroll management and customer support by launching a marketplace. But this isn’t just any marketplace - the offshore talent on Gushwork is trained in using AI solutions to supercharge efficiency.

Nayrhit Bhattacharya, the co-founder and CEO of Gushwork calls the shift that they’re catalyzing “uberizing the employee workforce.” The idea here is that you shouldn’t have to spend months trying to find the right person on UpWork or similar platforms - instead you can use someone for three hours a week, stop, and then start again when you need them, and this efficiency comes from leveraging AI.

The Gushwork team trains the people on their platform to use the latest-and-greatest AI solutions so they’re also mobilizing a new AI-savvy offshore workforce which I think is pretty darn cool.

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Unstructured raises $25M

One of the key challenges everyone is talking about when it comes to LLMs is accessing proprietary data. We’ve all heard a few examples by now of companies that have found employees accidentally leaking confidential data to ChatGPT and that has made a lot of Enterprise companies pretty hesitate to dive into the Generative AI world.

The problem goes a bit deeper though because Enterprises tend to have lots and lots of data, but it’s a huge mess, so for those who are ready to dip their toes in the LLM waters, their data isn’t ready to primetime.

This is the problem that Unstructured is trying to solve, one the founders saw first-hand while working together at Primer AI.

“Organizations generate vast amounts of unstructured data on a daily basis, which when combined with LLMs can supercharge productivity. The problem is that this data is scattered,” Raymond continued. “The dirty secret in the NLP community is that data scientists today still must build artisanal, one-off data connectors and pre-processing pipelines completely manually. Unstructured [delivers] a comprehensive solution for connecting, transforming and staging natural language data for LLMs.” (Source)

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Cognaize raises $18M Series A

To round out my funding highlights this week I thought I’d double-down on what I just talked about above - getting data organized in a meaningful way so it can actually be used for AI.

Enter Cognaize - a startup that is helping Fintech companies make use of their unstructured data that is now enjoying fresh funding in part thanks to some monster clients in the credit and insurance space.

The new funding round is led by Argonautic Ventures and while the valuation was not disclosed, the founding team did say it was in the hundreds of millions, so not too shabby.

The founders of Cognaize previously ran a Fintech company so the problem they are solving is something well within their wheelhouse. What they’re focusing on is a blindspot for many companies - most of the data that is being unlocked today by AI is structured data, but this represents only a fraction of the data a company has access to.

Cognaize has decided to focus on unstructured data which would allow companies to gain actionable insights on a lot more data, and in the world of finance, better insights based on more data usually means - you guessed it, more money 💸

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Okay - that’s it for this week, thanks for reading and please, tell all your friends about this Substack - it’s free, it’s weekly(ish) and hopefully it’s opening more eyes to all the incredibly cool innovations AI startups are bringing the world.