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The past few years have been tough for edtech companies. In recent months, multiple edtech startups have raised fresh funding rounds while specifically touting AI as a core part of their business model. These deals could signal that AI is ushering in a new era for edtech companies, and VCs who invest in the space are excited about the renaissance. And Ednition, also one of Donnelly's portfolio companies, provides an infrastructure-as-a-service platform for other edtech companies to improve the data that goes into their AI models. That's why it's so important to invest in ed-tech AI startups that help people rethink how they interact with technology and learn new skills necessary to successfully enter the workforce, he said.
Persons: PitchBook, VCs, Brian Dixon, Dixon, we've, Numerade, Kapoor, Katelyn Donnelly, she's, I've, you'll, Donnelly, Avalance, OpenAI, we're, ChatGPT, Ryan Craig, Craig, edtech Organizations: Business, Labs, Kapor, Partners, Chingona Ventures, TechCrunch, Kapoor Capital, Lirvana Labs, Odyssey Education, University Ventures, ACT Locations: VCs, edtech
Steve Bowsher, In-Q-TelSteve Bowsher, president and CEO of In-Q-Tel. He made an early bet on Palantir, blowing the doors open for Silicon Valley techies to go after federal contracts. The son of a federal employee who grew up devouring spy novels, Bowsher has always been interested in the work of the government but actually cut his teeth in Silicon Valley. After graduating from Stanford, he worked for three startups and spent eight years at venture fund InterWest Partners. By combining Silicon Valley's swashbuckling ethos with a government agency's mission-driven mentality, Bowsher has helped shepherd some of the biggest defense tech success stories of the past two decades.
Persons: Steve Bowsher, Bowsher Organizations: Magazine, Stanford, InterWest Partners Locations: Menlo Park , California, Silicon Valley
The startup, Read AI, closed a $21 million Series A funding round in April. Goodwater Capital led the round, with participation from existing investor Madrona Venture Group, which led the startup's $10 million seed round in 2021. David Shin, who co-founded Read AI alongside Robert Williams and Elliott Waldron, told Business Insider that the generative AI boom over the last year has supercharged what the startup can offer clients. Read AI offers multiple pricing plans, including a basic, free version for individual users as well as enterprise and enterprise plus accounts that cost $22.50 and $29.75 a month per user, respectively. Check out the 23-slide presentation Read AI used to raise $21 million in Series A funding.
Persons: David Shin, Robert Williams, Elliott Waldron, Read Organizations: Goodwater Capital, Madrona Venture Group, Business, Microsoft, Google, Read, Bloomberg Locations: Seattle
VCs are hungry to back vector database startups and other behind-the-scenes tech that improves AI. Vector databases store and structure data that LLMs can then pull from. Business Insider has idenfied seven vector database startups that have been early winners. download the app Email address Sign up By clicking “Sign Up”, you accept our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy . Vector databases capture and store the essence of a particular piece of data that a machine-learning program or LLM can then pull from.
Persons: Organizations: Business, Service
Newly launched startup Superintelligent is betting it can solve this problem and help more people master using AI in their work and personal lives. The company just exited stealth with $2 million in pre-seed funding from Learn Capital, an edtech-focused VC fund. Based in New York, Superintelligent is a learning platform designed to help people understand how to use AI tools. "People who never would have cared about taking an online course before will 100% find themselves looking for online tools for learning AI." More broadly, AI is providing a boon to the edtech space, with startups such as Lirvana Labs, which provides AI learning for kids; Curipod, which lets teachers create AI lesson plans; and AI-powered study assistants Digest.ai and FoondMate all raising funding recently.
Persons: , OpenAI's DALL, Superintelligent, Nathaniel Whittemore, Whittemore, Digest.ai, he's Organizations: Service, Pew Research Center, Learn, Business, Labs Locations: New York
Read previewAI has been a boom for the education space, and one startup just raised millions by convincing investors that large language models and generative AI will supercharge kids' learning. The startup, Lirvana Labs, just raised $5.3 million in seed funding from Kapor Capital, Transcend Capital Partners, and Chingona Ventures, Business Insider has learned. Lirvana Labs is betting that AI can counteract these trends. The startup's tech is available via a mobile app, which costs $9.99 monthly or $69.99 annually. Check out the 13-slide pitch deck Lirvana Labs used to raise its seed-funding round.
Persons: , Christie, Clement Pang, Pang, Christie Pang Organizations: Service, Lirvana Labs, Kapor, Partners, Chingona Ventures, Business, National Center for Education Studies, Nations Locations: Menlo Park , California, Lebanon
65% of startups on Kruze Consulting's platform are paying for OpenAI, up from just 3% when the chatbot launched in late 2022. Back then, OpenAI had an API service that one to three percent of his clients were using, Jones told Insider in an interview. At fintech unicorn CloudWalk, which is building a payments network, a few engineers started using ChatGPT Plus on their own and praising the application on company Slack channels. Indeed, the growing adoption of ChatGPT is creating demand for engineers who are especially savvy at using generative AI to get work done more quickly. "The feedback we got, which is indirectly related to our using AI, is that investors didn't understand how our team has so many clients and has built so much," Siegal said.
Persons: Healy Jones, OpenAI, Jones, Luis Silva, Carlyle, Lauder, ChatGPT, Silva, We're, CloudWalk, he's, Anthropic, GitHub Copilot, Jared Siegal, Siegal, Copilot, Axel Springer Organizations: Kruze Consulting, OpenAI's, Business, OpenAI, Kruze, ChatGPT, eBay, Slack, ChatGPT Enterprise, Lauder Companies Locations: Brazil, Kruze, GitHub
Sam Altman's act may be wearing thin
  + stars: | 2024-03-26 | by ( Dan Defrancesco | ) www.businessinsider.com   time to read: +7 min
download the app Email address Sign up By clicking “Sign Up”, you accept our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy . In today's big story, we're looking into how some in Silicon Valley are starting to sour on OpenAI's Sam Altman . AdvertisementFrom hardball tactics when raising funds to relentless self-mythologizing about his role in the future of tech, Altman's act is wearing thin on some . Even VCs uninterested in AI deals are quickly becoming servants to Altman's AI empire. Big market, fall hard.
Persons: , Baltimore's Francis Scott Key, Sam Altman, Alastair Grant, Rebecca Zisser, Darius Rafieyan, Altman, Elon Musk, à, Steve Jobs, VCs, Samantha Stokes, Eric Baradat, Torsten Slok, David Rosenberg, BofA, Drew Watson, Birkin, Abanti Chowdhury, Elon, Don Lemon, that's, Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Google's, Meta, Dave Calhoun, Aaron Schwartz, Adam Neumann, Neumann, Robert F, Kennedy Jr, Dan DeFrancesco, Hallam Bullock, George Glover, Grace Lett Organizations: Business, Service, Baltimore Fire Department, Tech, Apple Vision, NFL, ChatGPT, Kruze Consulting, Apollo Global Management, Federal Reserve, Bank of America, Abanti, Getty Images, Street Locations: Silicon Valley, Plenty, Big, Orlando, New York, London, Chicago
But Reddit's co-founder took to X to call out a perceived slight by investor Initialized Capital. But it's not all sunshine and roses for Reddit, whose co-founder and early investors are bickering on social media. Alexis Ohanian called out Initialized Capital investors on X after the firm's social media account failed to congratulate him by name on Reddit's IPO. Garry Tan tweeted a congrtulations to both Alexis Ohanian an Steve Huffman on Reddit's IPO. Ohanian, Tan, and representatives for Initialized Capital did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Persons: Reddit, Reddit's, , it's, Alexis Ohanian, Steve Huffman, Y, Garry Tan —, Ohanian, Tan, Brett Gibson, Jen Wolf, @jenhwolf, George Floyd's, Michael Seibel, Tan's, confidentially, Instacart, Huffman, Garry Tan, Garry Organizations: Service, Twitter, VC, NYSE, New York Stock Exchange
Reddit went public on Thursday after raising $748 million in its IPO. CEO Steve Huffman and Sam Altman and his network of investment firms are some who profited the most. Reddit is the most recent tech company to debut in the public markets as Wall Street watches to gauge the dormant IPO market. The company, founded in 2005 by Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian, had been rumored to go public over the past several years. However, the market has been shaky for the past two years, causing several companies to put off pursuing IPOs because of less-than-desirable macro conditions.
Persons: Reddit, Steve Huffman, Sam Altman, Alexis Ohanian Organizations: Business
Menlo Ventures has been an early backer of AI powerhouses including security startup Abnormal, LLM developer Anthropic, and vector database Pinecone. "AI itself is not new, I think it's just how mainstream it's become," Matt Murphy, a Menlo Ventures partner who invests in SaaS and robotics startups, told Business Insider in an interview. AI's "picks and shovels"Murphy and fellow Menlo Ventures partner Tim Tully say that 2024 will be a big year for the "picks and shovels" of AI. There's room in the game for more LLMsSam Altman's OpenAI has been at the forefront of the generative AI revolution. Other vector database startups including Chorma and Weaviate have also raised millions from VCs.
Persons: , Siri, Warby Parker, Matt Murphy, OpenAI, AI's, Murphy, Tim Tully, Tully —, Sana, Lindy, we've, Tully, Sam Altman's OpenAI, it's Organizations: Service, Valley's, Menlo Ventures, Business, Menlo, Cisco, Oracle, Meta, Google Locations: Snowflake, Anthropic
Inside Startupland's 'Shroom Boom'
  + stars: | 2024-03-13 | by ( Samantha Stokes | ) www.businessinsider.com   time to read: +11 min
This story is available exclusively to Business Insider subscribers. Frohman is part of a small but growing community within the startups industry that is experimenting with small doses of psilocybin to improve focus and productivity. Business Insider spoke with multiple founders and investors who microdosed, but wished to be anonymous. The person declined to share their name for publication, but their identity is known by Business Insider. Vancouver-based Filament Health is working to expand access to natural psychedelics through an extraction and drug-discovery process, while brick-and-mortar shops Shroomyz and Fun Guyz are further fueling the Canadian "'Shroom Boom".
Persons: Scott Frohman, Frohman, hasn't, Microdosing, James Fadiman —, Koel Robinson, Robinson, Richard Laver, Steve Jobs, Peter Grinspon, Grinspon, Peggy Van de Plassche, Van de Plassche, She's, Justin Zhu, I'm, microdosing, they're, It's Organizations: Business, Rocket Beverage Group, Erewhon, Foods, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, BMO, PsyMed Ventures, Noetic Fund Locations: Florida, San Francisco, Denver, Minneapolis, In Oregon, California , Iowa, Washington State, Vermont, Massachusetts, Vancouver, Palo Santo
Digital health benefits startup Fijoya just came out of stealth and announced an $8.3 million seed round from Team8, the Israeli venture group that creates startups and invests in existing ones across the cyber, data infrastructure, fintech, digital health, and AI industries. As Americans are spending more than ever on healthcare, Fijoya is one of many healthtech startups cropping up to tackle the financial aspects of healthcare. Now, out of stealth, Fijoya is focusing on giving employees an easier way to choose healthcare benefits that best suit their lifestyles. "This end-to-end approach signifies our commitment to simplify health benefits by offering a wide range of options with a seamless discovery, selection, and payment process.'" Check out the 15-slide pitch deck Fijoya used to raise its seed funding round.
Persons: Team8, Baruch Levy, Levy Organizations: Business, Health, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Norwest Venture Partners Locations: Team8, Israel
download the appSign up to get the inside scoop on today’s biggest stories in markets, tech, and business — delivered daily. What's on deck:This story is available exclusively to Business Insider subscribers. The big storyAI (literally) in your pocketTech workers are criticizing Humane's hotly anticipated Ai pin. AdvertisementIn fact, heavy hitters like legendary investor Vinod Khosla believe that AI devices will completely change how we interact with technology. Humane's Ai Pin, which can project text onto users' hands and translate voice messages, didn't get a warm welcome when it launched late last year .
Persons: , Oompa, I've, Willy Wonka, Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Humane's, Vinod Khosla, Samantha Stokes, Vishal Persaud, Khosla, Ai, didn't, Tim Cook, Salesforce's Marc Benioff, OpenAI's Sam Altman, Franck Robichon, Paul Krugman, shouldn't, we're, Wells, Bank of America's Merrill, Bitcoin, Tyler Le, maven, Alexei Navalny's, Dan DeFrancesco, Hallam Bullock, Jordan Parker Erb, George Glover Organizations: Service, Business, Humane, Khosla Ventures, Rabbit, Bank of America's, Wall, The New York Times, WW, SEC Locations: Franck, Wells Fargo, New York, London
"The key isn't hardware but the user experience it enables," Khosla, whose firm Khosla Ventures, is an investor in Rabbit, told Business Insider in an email. This story is available exclusively to Business Insider subscribers. At the same time, I don't think the average consumer wants to carry around multiple devices," S. Somasegar, a managing director at Madrona, told Business Insider. That's where we're at," he told Business Insider. Ginsberg said he's excited about the Humnane Pin because AI voice assistants have finally become powerful enough to be useful for average consumers.
Persons: Vinod Khosla, Khosla, Navin Chaddha, Ai, Somasegar, Bernstein, Nielsen, Zachary Ginsburg, Ginsberg, Marc Benioff, Sam Altman, Lachy Groom, Avi Schiffmann, it's, Chaddha Organizations: Khosla Ventures, Software, Business, Mayfield, Microsoft, Calm Ventures, Bond Ventures, Forerunner Ventures, Harvard Locations: Humane's
Infinity Ventures's Jeremy Jonker, former head of corporate development and PayPal Ventures at PayPal, led the most recent funding round, joining investors including Michael Vaughn and Jon Pomerantz of Vera Equity and Rex Salisbury of Cambrian Ventures. "It's been sign up after sign up after sign up," he told Business Insider in an interview. SimpleClosure's funding round comes as more startups than ever are shutting down thanks to a tech-market downturn that's left plenty of companies in the lurch. 770 startups shut down in 2023, up from 467 the year before, according to data from cap-table management startup Carta. "More than half of our customers have been entrepreneurs who are already starting their next company," Yona said.
Persons: VCs, Jeremy Jonker, Michael Vaughn, Jon Pomerantz, Vera Equity, Rex Salisbury, Dori Yona, SimpleClosure, Yona, he's, couldn't, doesn't, there's, We've, what's Organizations: Business, PayPal, Cambrian Ventures, SimpleClosure, Carta Locations: fintech
Its GPT, which generates images from text prompts, is currently ranked second overall on the GPT Store. And all three companies' GPTs have been highlighted at the top of the GPT Store website as "OpenAI's Picks." Advertisement"Sometimes finding trails can be overwhelming because there are so many different places to go," Graham told Business Insider. In addition to GPT Store, companies are thinking more broadly about how AI fits into their business models. "Now we're also investing time in using AI to make our team faster and more efficient, too."
Persons: , OpenAI, Canva, Anwar Haneef, Matthias Keller, James Graham, Sam Altman, Graham, GPTs, Sam Altman's, Keller, we're, Haneef Organizations: Service, Business, Uber, Sequoia Capital Global, Bessemer Venture Partners, Greenoaks, Booking Holdings, OpenAI, Economic, Canva Locations: Davos, Canva, ChatGPT
Read previewSome Wall Street giants, many of which have spent the last few years pledging to fight climate change through corporate responsibility, are now retreating from some of their environmental initiatives. Founded in 2017, Climate Action 100+ initially launched as a five-year initiative that in 2022 was extended until 2030. AdvertisementFollowing the departures of JPMorgan, State Street, and Pimco, financial investors including Neuberger Berman, William Blair Investment Management, and Wellington Management remain members of Climate Action 100+, whose targeted companies include American Airlines, Chevron, and Procter & Gamble. Other finance giants have similarly stepped back from previous environmentally friendly initiatives, The New York Times reported. They include BlackRock, which scaled back its participation with Climate Action 100+ in recent weeks, as well as Bank of America, which walked back a pledge to stop financing coal.
Persons: , Neuberger Berman, William Blair Organizations: Service, JPMorgan, State Street, Business, New York Times, Politico, State, William Blair Investment Management, Wellington Management, Climate, American Airlines, Chevron, Procter, Gamble, The New York Times, BlackRock, Bank of America
In Gemini 1.5, improvements to the new tech are leaps and bounds above what the original Gemini can do. Gemini 1.5 Pro's context window capacity, however, can handle up to 1 million tokens. Gemini 1.5 is also getting better at generating good responses from super-long queries, without a user needing to spend much additional time fine-tuning their queries. Google says that in rolling out Gemini 1.5, it underwent extensive ethics and safety testing to greenlight it for wider release. The tech company has conducted research on AI safety risks and has developed techniques to mitigate potential harm.
Persons: , Sundar Pichai, Demis Hassabis, OpenAI's, Febrary, MoE Organizations: Service, Google, Gemini
download the appSign up to get the inside scoop on today’s biggest stories in markets, tech, and business — delivered daily. AdvertisementThe year of the "AI app layer"Gil sees 2024 as the year that the “AI app layer” will start to crystalize, bringing the power of rapidly advancing foundation models to the masses. For someone with so much skin in the AI game, it’s notable that Gil’s portfolio does not include the big foundation models companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Cohere. Gil says he has been impressed with how quickly the legacy tech companies have moved to corner the market on cutting-edge AI research. But with the Biden administration’s more robust antitrust posture, Gil says there’s a lot of much-needed consolidation that’s not happening.
Persons: , OpenAI, Elad Gil, Harvey, Character.ai, “ We're, ” Gil, ChatGPT, Gil, Gil's, , “ they’ve, Biden, there’s Organizations: Service, Business, Twitter, Mixer Labs, Google, Apple, Fortune, “ Enterprises Locations: Airbnb, MistralAI, Silicon Valley
AbridgeAbridge CEO Dr. Shiv Rao. AbridgeHQ: PittsburghTotal raised: $62.5 millionWhat it does: The medical scribe startup uses large language models to document patient-doctor interactions in electronic medical records. What makes it promising: Easing administrative burdens for providers is top of mind for investors as growing burnout drives more clinicians out of the healthcare field. Abridge is using AI to tackle one of the most time-consuming, burnout-inducing processes in healthcare — clinical documentation.
Persons: Abridge, Shiv Rao Organizations: Abridge, Pittsburgh
The big storyCareer makersInflection AI, Maven, Forage, The GrandWhich startup would you recommend a friend or family member should work at? That was the prompt for Business Insider's VC and startups team as it compiled a list of early-stage companies to bet your career on . The list doesn't have specific parameters, Leena Rao, the deputy editor of BI's VC and startups team, told me. With so much money pouring into AI startups, founders' attention will naturally be drawn to the tech when thinking about their next project. Meanwhile, the volatility among startups comes at a time of broader instability for the tech industry.
Persons: , Elon Musk, Taylor Swift, Leena Rao, Maven, Alyssa Powell, Ben Bergman, there's, Moody's, Paul Tudor Jones, We've, Jenny Chang, Rodriguez, OpenAI, Samantha Stokes, Andrea Chronopoulos, Bob Iger, Lachlan Murdoch, David Zaslav, Dan DeFrancesco, Hallam Bullock, Jordan Parker Erb, George Glover Organizations: Business, Service, Business Insider's, Big Tech, Meta, Flagstar Bank, Facebook, YouTube, Google, BI, ESPN, Warner Bros, Fox, Walt Disney Company Locations: NYCB, New York, London
The healthcare startup, Forta, raised a Series A funding round in January led by Insight Partners. Das added that because every child using Forta receives personalized care, the startup's AI is trained to look at health records and recommend treatments. Indeed, a clinician shortage is creating opportunities for digital health startups to build out mental healthcare services. Mental health coaching startup tapouts just raised a $3.2 million seed round, while incumbents Brightline and Hazel Health have each raised tens of millions of dollars to provide pediatric mental healthcare. Take a look at the 14-slide pitch deck Forta used to raise its $55 million Series A funding round.
Persons: , Warby Parker, Allbirds, Forta, Ritankar Das, Forta's, Das, Hazel Organizations: Service, Business, Insight Partners, Exor Ventures, Ventures, Mental, Hazel Health
Dario Amodei, Daniela Amodei, Tom Brown, Jack Clark, Jared Kaplan, and Sam McCandlish, cofounders of AnthropicAnthropic's Dario Amodei, Jack Clark, and Daniela Amodei. Since then, the company has received billions in funding from both Google and Amazon in what some have termed an "AI arms race." CEO Dario Amodei, a former Google Brain researcher with a Ph.D. in computational neuroscience, has been writing about the cataclysmic potential of AI since 2016. Constitutional AI is partly the brainchild of two other OpenAI alums and Anthropic cofounders, Tom Brown and Jared Kaplan. Both Kaplan and Brown have worked on Anthropic's efforts to "red team" the company's flagship language model, Claude, probing for misuse possibilities.
Persons: Dario Amodei, Daniela Amodei, Tom Brown, Jack Clark, Jared Kaplan, Sam McCandlish, Anthropic Anthropic's Dario Amodei, Menlo Ventures Anthropic, Amodei's, Anthropic, , Anthropic cofounders, Brown, Kaplan, Johns Hopkins, Claude, AGI, I'm Organizations: Google, Menlo Ventures, Bloomberg, Johns, OpenAI Locations: OpenAI, GPT
In today's big story, we're looking at the best investors when it comes to early-stage companies. The big storyPicking winnersCaterina Fake, Cindi Bi, and Suleman AliInvesting can be a crapshoot, especially when it comes to early-stage companies. AdvertisementThe investors, profiled by BI's Ben Bergman, Samantha Stokes, Rebecca Torrence, and Leena Rao, have an incredible track record for early-stage investing. Silicon Valley can be known to have a herd mentality, especially when it comes to venture investors. And yet, some of the best early-stage investors have proven to have far better success going out on their own.
Persons: , we've, Caterina Fake, Suleman Ali, BI's Ben Bergman, Samantha Stokes, Rebecca Torrence, Leena Rao, Joseph Aaron, cofounders, Tanja Ivanova, isn't, Chanos, Elon Musk, Jim Chanos, Tesla, Musk, Dan Ives, Goldman Sachs, Goldman, Brittany Hosea, Satya Nadella, Sam Altman, Philipp Schindler, Google's, Alyssa Powell, Michelle Obama, Betty White, Steve Harvey, Muhammad Ali, Benjamin Franklin, Al Capone, Calvin Harris, Charles Schwab, They've Organizations: Service, Business, Reuters, Getty, Elon, Tesla, Apple, Microsoft, Google, BI Locations: pant, San Francisco, Brittany, China, Davos, ChatGPT's
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