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☆ Meet Glean, the enterprise AI search company that's so powerful Sam Altman deemed it a threat to OpenAI
▼ + stars: | 2024-10-31 | by ( Sri Muppidi | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +10 min

Among them are Anthropic, Elon Musk's xAI, OpenAI cofounder Ilya Sutskever's Safe Superintelligence, and AI search startup Perplexity. The last of the five rivals, and perhaps the least well-known, is Glean, an enterprise search assistant. Founded in 2019 by Rubrik cofounder and ex-Googler Arvind Jain, Glean helps corporate workers find information across their companies' tools and data. Related Video Sam Altman moves to Microsoft after OpenAI fires him as CEOThe company enables AI search by integrating apps like Slack and Dropbox and powering search across their company's universe of data. AdvertisementBesides enterprise search, Glean also has an AI assistant that generates answers based on search results, such as summarizing the day's Slack messages or synthesizing multiple documents.

Persons: Glean, Jain, —, Sam Altman, Elon Musk's, Ilya Sutskever's, Googler Arvind Jain, Kleiner Perkins, Deedy Das, Larry Page, Das, Bipul Sinha, Rubrik, Mamoon Hamid, Vishwanath, Tony Gentilcore, Piyush Prahladka, …, Arvind, Hamid, Paul, Rajeev Dham, they're, Slack, Altman, It's Organizations: Google, Service, Elon Musk's xAI, DST Global, Sapphire Ventures, Sequoia, Microsoft, Sony Electronics, Entrepreneurship, Indian Institute of Technology, IIT, Menlo Ventures, IIT Delhi, University of Washington, Akamai Technologies, Technology, YouTube, Kleiner Locations: Jaipur, Indian, IIT Delhi, India, Glean, Seattle

☆ The 2024 AI Power List: Matt McIlwain
▼ + stars: | 2024-10-24 | by ( Ben Bergman | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: 1 min

Operating in Seattle, in the shadow of Amazon and Microsoft headquarters, McIlwain's Madrona Ventures was an early investor in AI companies such as Xnor.ai, which Apple acquired in 2020. The firm likes to say no investment is too early, as it prefers to be there as early as formation. Madrona also hosts the annual Intelligent Applications Summit, with this year's event featuring Mustafa Suleyman, the CEO of Microsoft AI, and Arvind Jain, the CEO and cofounder of Glean. McIlwain says companies should focus more on their business model than on an AI model. See Business Insider's full AI Power List

Persons: Madrona, Mustafa Suleyman, Arvind Jain, McIlwain Organizations: Microsoft, McIlwain's Madrona Ventures, Apple Locations: Seattle

☆ Security threats to AI models are giving rise to a new crop of startups
▼ + stars: | 2024-10-16 | by ( Sri Muppidi | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +5 min

The hazards against AI models and the data that train them are growing in the age of large language models. What's emerged is a growing group of startups aimed at tackling security threats related to AI. Credo AI, which has raised $41.3 million in total funding, is an AI governance platform that helps companies adopt AI responsibly by measuring and monitoring its risks. Pappu added that customers may not be aware that the shared information may also be used to train broader AI models. AdvertisementTo address the growing number of security concerns in AI, startups are now applying continuous monitoring to the space.

Persons: —, Ashish Kakran, What's, Kakran, that's, Narayana Pappu, Pappu, Arvind Jain, Lauri Moore, Moore, Arvind Ayyala, Ayyala Organizations: Companies, Service, Thomvest Ventures, Attackers, Bessemer Venture Partners, Haize Labs, Evolution Equity, Moore Strategic Ventures

☆ OpenAI's rivals are on the prowl after an exodus of high-level executives
▼ + stars: | 2024-10-02 | by ( Melia Russell | Ben Bergman | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +7 min

Investors are flocking to OpenAI, but it's losing high-level executives at an alarming rate. Suddenly, it's open season for OpenAI employees. Rivals like Anthropic and Perplexity are signaling to workers that they put mission over profits. Suddenly, it's starting to feel like open season for OpenAI employees. A recruiter said his search firm has fielded more interest from current OpenAI employees since the board's ouster of Sam Altman a year ago.

Persons: —, Mira Murati, Ilya Sutskever, Andrej Karpathy, John Schulman, Greg Brockman, Alex Klein, he's, Dan Miller, Tim Tully, Sam Altman, Jason Redmond, weren't, Klein, OpenAI, Jack Guez, Anthropic, Jan Leike, Schulman, Durk Kingma, Kingma, Matt Murphy, Arvind Jain, Jain, Matt Hoffman, Johnny Ho, Ho Organizations: Rivals, Service, OpenAI, LinkedIn, Menlo Ventures, Ark Venture Fund, Business, Getty, Google, Anthropic, Employees, Engineers Locations: OpenAI, AFP, Bay

☆ The hottest AI startups are raising back-to-back funding rounds. Suddenly, it's feeling very 2021 in Silicon Valley for a chosen few.
▼ + stars: | 2024-09-20 | by ( Ben Bergman | Melia Russell | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +11 min

Read previewIn February, Glean announced a $200 million funding round valuing the AI enterprise software startup at $2.2 billion. AdvertisementThe transaction is the latest in a string of dizzying back-to-back funding rounds at ever-higher valuations for a handful of AI startups that stand in stark contrast to the doldrums of the overall market for startups. Earlier this year, Sakana raised $30 million in a seed funding round led by Lux Capital. Slingshot AI, which has built an automated mental health counselor, also raised separate rounds of funding just months apart. Advertisement"VCs are increasingly faced with frequent requests from their hot AI companies to follow on or double down on investments," said Iris Sun, an investor at 500 Global.

Persons: —, Glean, Arvind Jain's inbox, Jain, Steve Brotman, Perplexity, SoftBank, Sakana, Gregg Hill, that's, Matt Murphy, Dario Amodei, Kimberly White, Murphy, I'd, I've, Jenny Chang, Rodriguez, Jai Das, Rajeev Dham, couldn't, Das, Sapphire, Uber, Iris Sun, Chandrasekar Organizations: Service, Business, DST Global, Alpha Partners, Bloomberg, Google, New Enterprise Associates, Khosla Ventures, Lux Capital, Parkway Venture Capital, Menlo Ventures, Getty, Sapphire Ventures, Investments Locations: Tokyo

☆ AI-powered search startup Glean doubles valuation in new funding round led by Altimeter
▼ + stars: | 2024-09-10 | by ( Riley De León | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +2 min

AI-powered search startup Glean said Tuesday it has raised $260 million in a funding round that values the tech company at $4.6 billion — more than double its last reported valuation. Glean competes with a herd of well-financed generative AI startups and tech giants, attempting to compete with Microsoft Copilot and chatbot Amazon Q. Glean's Series E round, led by Altimeter and DST Global, includes Craft Ventures, Sapphire Ventures, and SoftBank Vision Fund 2, all new investors in the company. Founder and CEO Arvind Jain started Glean in 2019 with other former Google engineers as an enterprise search engine. The company soon transitioned to generative AI.

Persons: Arvind Jain, Glean, Catalyst, Kleiner Perkins, Jain Organizations: CNBC, Glean, Microsoft, DST Global, Craft Ventures, Sapphire Ventures, Latitude, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Sequoia Capital, IDC Locations: Lisbon, Portugal, Palo Alto , California

☆ 'These are not normal;' A new type of dealmaking for AI startups is rattling Silicon Valley
▼ + stars: | 2024-08-10 | by ( Ben Bergman | Sri Muppidi | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +7 min

Google unnerved Silicon Valley last week when it agreed to pay $2.5 billion to license Character.AI's technology, hire its two superstar cofounders and 20 percent of employees. The deal came after AI developers Adept and Inflection both effectively sold themselves to Amazon and Microsoft, respectively, in recent months. It was only last year Character.AI raised $150 million in venture funding, which valued the company at $850 million. Its appeal as a chatbot that uses AI to make virtual characters that interact with users seems decidedly niche. Related storiesMost of the founders and investors Business Insider spoke to for this story say Google has little interest in Character.AI's actual product.

Persons: cofounders, Brent Queener, Kyle Sanford, Character.AI, Iris Sun, Noam Shazeer, Daniel De Freitas, Jack Selby, Peter Thiel's, Steve Brotman, Shazeer, De Freitas, PitchBook's Sanford, they're, Roy Bahat, Arvind Jain, Cameron Lester, Lester Organizations: Service, Microsoft, Bonfire Ventures, Business, Apple, Big Tech, AZ, Biden Administration, Federal Trade Commission, Department of Justice, Alpha Partners, FTC, DOJ, New York Times, Google, Madrona Venture, Bloomberg Beta, Jefferies

☆ The biggest risk corporations see in gen AI usage isn't hallucinations
▼ + stars: | 2024-05-16 | by ( Rachel Curry | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +6 min

Meanwhile, 45% of organizations encountered unintended data exposure when implementing AI solutions, according to AvePoint's 2024 AI and Information Management Report. "It's often what we call dark data," Simberkoff said. So how do leaders improve data permissions and protections in light of or, ideally, before AI implementation? "It's making your end users aware of the information you're responsible for. "When you're using AI, it's really important to make sure that you're checking it and that you're using it for its purpose."

Persons: Dana Simberkoff, Simberkoff, Arvind Jain, Jain, Jason Hardy, Hardy, it's, they're Organizations: Microsoft, CNBC, Hitachi Vantara

☆ AI startup Glean lures Citigroup as investor at $2.2 billion valuation after revenue quadruples
▼ + stars: | 2024-02-27 | by ( Jordan Novet | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +3 min

Arvind Jain, co-founder and CEO of Glean, makes a selfie with employees of the startup, which is based in Palo Alto, Calif. Artificial intelligence startup Glean attracted tech companies Databricks and Workday into its latest investment round. Glean, whose software sifts through corporate repositories to provide quick answers to workers' questions, said Tuesday that it's raised $200 million at a $2.2 billion valuation. Glean's annualized revenue at the end of January was $39 million, up from $10 million a year earlier. While Glean initially targeted the tech industry, it's now looking to expand in financial services, retail, manufacturing and other sectors, Jain said.

Persons: Arvind Jain, it's, Kleiner Perkins, Arvind Purushotham, OpenAI, Jain, Glean, Purushotham, Citi hasn't, Cathy Gao Organizations: Wall, Banking, Citigroup, Lightspeed, Sequoia, Citi Ventures, CNBC, Microsoft, Google, Sony Electronics, Citigroup's, Citi, Nvidia, Sapphire Locations: Palo Alto, Calif, LLMs, OpenAI, Glean

☆ VC firm Sequoia is pulling out all the stops to dominate AI, insiders say. The firm is using everything from 'speed dating' to star studded summits to woo founders.
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-22 | by ( Stephanie Palazzolo | Ben Bergman | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +10 min

It's just one move of many the VC firm has taken to cement its position in the white-hot AI space. Huang and Grady wrote a public blog post on Sequoia's website inviting AI founders to email them their ideas and pitches directly. But the firm has been louder where it counts, investing in splashy AI startups like Harvey and LangChain. Every member of the firm, from managing partner Roleof Botha on down, has made AI a top priority, with Grady, Huang, and Buhler most prominently involved. Both Huang and Buhler now spend over 90% of their time researching AI companies, versus 50% in previous years, they said.

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