AI Funding Weekly - Monster Seed Week

Seed rounds over $100M? Why not?

Welcome to AI Funding Weekly, a different take on AI funding news. I’m trying to add a little more fun to what can otherwise be a relatively interesting yet dry topic. I’m not a finance writer, I’m the founder of an AI startup, so expect a little different perspective and hopefully a little chuckle here and there - which we could all use more of right?

Every week I’ll bring you digestible, bite-sized updates on what’s happening in the world of AI funding. My goal is to give you something you can read quickly, in the morning, in less time than it takes to drink half a cup of coffee ☕

Okay, enough preamble - let’s dive in.

🤯 Mistral AI raises $113M seed round

The most jaw-dropping story in AI funding last week was, without a doubt, Mistral AI raising an $113M seed round at a $260M valuation. The company is founded by three friends in their early 30’s, all previously ex-Meta and Google researches.

So what are they doing that has investors so excited? In short - they want to take on OpenAI and build something more, well, open. Okay but that didn’t really answer you question did it? So what are they actually going to do? Here’s the skinny from TechCrunch because we all want to hear their guess right?

It’s very early to talk about what Mistral is doing or will be doing — it’s only around a month old — but from what Mensch said, the plan is to build models using only publicly available data to avoid legal issues that some others have faced over training data, he said; users will be able to contribute their own datasets, too. Models and data sets will be open-sourced, as well. (Source - TechCrunch)

Yes, the company is a month old and it’s worth $260M to investors like Lightspeed Ventures who led the round. But they’re not alone in thinking this trio is going to do something big, Google CEO Eric Schmidt is also a noted shareholder.

Are we living in a time where three super smart AI people can come together, decide to take on OpenAI, and suddenly find themselves with over $100M in the bank to do it? I guess we are - welcome to 2023.

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🌍 Back on planet earth - Blackbird.ai raised $20M in Series B funding

$20M in Series B funding is a solid round and a good reminder that we still live on Planet Earth and things can and do makes sense, sometimes, right?

I Blackbird.ai is doing something very cool, they use AI to help companies identify threats coming from manipulation of human perception. It may sound like a far off concept but we’re moving into a world where perception can be altered in new and unexpected ways, detecting this is tricky and using static rule sets won’t keep up with the pace of technological advancement.

Okay, but I don’t say it nearly as well as the CEO so let’s hear it from him ⬇️

"Human perception has become the latest frontier in cyberattacks, manifesting as misinformation and narrative manipulation. We aim to help organizations understand and address the potential threats posed by perception manipulation, which often fly under the radar, fostering an environment of trust, safety and integrity, while simultaneously providing them with significant strategic and competitive leverage," said Wasim Khaled, CEO and co-founder, Blackbird.AI. (Source - Entrepreneur)

This funding round was led by Ten Eleven Ventures with support from existing investors and some pretty cool people in the Cybersecurity space like Paul Kurtz, the Chief Cybersecurity Advisor for Splunk and Richard Clarke, the first "Cyber Czar” for the US Government.

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💸 Salesforce doubles the size of their Generative AI Fund to $500M

In a world where companies are raising over $100M for a seed round when their company is only a month old, Salesforce decided it only made sense to double the size of their Generative AI fund. I’m kidding, kinda.

Initially planning on rolling out the fund at the $250M mark, Salesforce announced last week they would double their fund size to hit $500M. While what I said above was a bit tongue-and-cheek, I do think there’s some truth in it. To be a player in the AI funding space today you’re going to need deep pockets.

Of course Salesforce realistically won’t be leading many, or any, $100M rounds and it sounds like the real reason behind the increase is to broaden their exposure to more startups. Here’s the skinny from Salesforce themselves on the move ⬇️

“We are already seeing AI change the way the world works, and we’re excited to build on the momentum of our Generative AI Fund,” said Paul Drews, Managing Partner, Salesforce Ventures. “Expanding our Generative AI Fund enables us to work with even more entrepreneurs who are accelerating the development of transformative AI solutions for the enterprise, and we are excited to support the next generation of innovative founders.” (Source - Salesforce)

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And that’s a wrap for this week, you now know a little bit more about what’s going on in the world of AI funding, and hopefully you had a little more fun reading about it. Thanks for subscribing, tell all your friends, and I’ll see you next week 🕺