📌 9 AI Startups raise $280M+

BONUS: Andrej Karpathy's New AI Education Startup

July 17, 2024

TODAY’S RECAP 🗓️

  • Exa raises a $17M Series A — Search engine API for LLMs

  • Vectara raises a $25M Series A — RAG-as-a-Service

  • The San Francisco Compute Company raises a $12M Round — GPU trading platform

  • Arcee AI raises a $24M Series A — Custom small language models (SLMs)

  • Pactum raises a $20M Series B — Autonomous negotiations

  • 4 more rounds caught by my funding tracker

Read time: 3 minutes

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TOP PICKS 📢

1/5

Amount: $17M 🎉

Round: Series A

Lead Investor: Lightspeed Venture Partners

Exa is a search engine API for LLMs.

Their product, powered by embedding models similar to those behind ChatGPT, converts web pages into embeddings, providing a semantic search algorithm that bypasses SEO spam and AI-generated content prevalent in ordinary search engines. Customers use Exa to curate training data, retrieve knowledge for AI applications, etc.

2/5

Amount: $25M 🎉

Round: Series A

Lead Investor: FPV Ventures, Race Capital

Vectara’s platform provides Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) as a service.

Their latest innovation, Mockingbird, is a fine-tuned LLM engineered for RAG applications. It reduces hallucinations and improves structured output, providing reliable performance with low latency and costs.

3/5

Amount: $12M 🎉

Lead Investor: Altman Capital

San Francisco Compute Co. is a trading platform to rent computing power.

The platform caters to the needs of AI companies that require substantial computational resources for short periods without building their own infrastructure or entering into expensive long-term contracts.

4/5

Amount: $24M 🎉

Round: Series A

Lead Investor: Emergence Capital

Arcee is an interface for training and deploying custom small language models (SLMs).

Custom models are trained using Arcee's proprietary techniques, Model Merging and Spectrum. Model Merging combines the strengths of different models into 1 model and Spectrum optimizes the training process by targeting specific layers of the model.

5/5

Amount: $20M 🎉

Round: Series B

Lead Investor: Karma Ventures

Pactum is an AI platform to autonomously manage thousands of procurement negotiations simultaneously.

The platform utilizes AI models to understand negotiation behaviour and predict optimal outcomes. It integrates into existing procurement systems and continuously learns from each interaction, improving its negotiation strategies over time.

OTHER ROUNDS 🤏

ESSENTIAL INTRODUCTIONS

→ Huma raises a $80M Series D — AI-powered digital health platform

→ DreamBig Semiconductor raises a $75M Series B — Semiconductor solutions for AI

→ Kindo raises a $20.6M Round — Enterprise AI security management

→ Mira raises a $9M Seed — Decentralised AI infrastructure

PITCH DECKS & TOOLS ⚒️

New Pitch Decks

Trending Business Tools

  • Leap - AI automation for marketing and sales

  • Synthflow - Build voice AI agents for sales outreach, support & more

  • GPTZero - AI detector for ChatGPT, LLMs

BONUS 🔥

FOR CURIOUS MINDS

THAT’S IT FOR TODAY

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