OpenAI has initiated the monitoring of AI's "catastrophic risks"

Okta was hacked, 1337 raised a Seed round, another acquisition by Databricks, and emotion-detection AI

🗞 In the Know

• Cruise said that it has paused all driverless operations, a decision that comes just two days after the California DMV suspended its deployment and driverless testing permits, effectively ending its robotaxi operations in the state.

• Identity management provider Okta has been hacked, leading its stock to drop 11.5% in heavy trading. Okta said the hackers were able to access the system using a stolen credential. That makes Okta a high-value target for threat actors, who, in a worst-case scenario, could hypothetically gain access to dozens of other companies if successful in breaching Okta’s defenses.

• The Biden administration is expected to unveil a "sweeping" new executive order on artificial intelligence next week that will require AI models to undergo assessments before they can be used by federal workers.

• OpenAI has formed а team to watch out for "catastrophic risks" associated with AI, such as “chemical, biological, and radiological threats” as well as (gulp) “autonomous replication.” The team, called Preparedness, will be led by Aleksander Madry, the director of MIT’s Center for Deployable Machine Learning. Preparedness’ chief responsibilities will be tracking, forecasting and protecting against the dangers of future AI systems, ranging from their ability to persuade and fool humans (like in phishing attacks) to their malicious code-generating capabilities.

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🏁 VentureVista

• Twelve Labs, a startup developing AI models to understand videos, raised a $10M strategic round. Investors included Nvidia, Intel, and Samsung.
  
  “Twelve Labs was founded … to create an infrastructure for multimodal video understanding, with the first endeavor being semantic search — or ‘CTRL+F for videos,’” co-founder and CEO Jae Lee told TechCrunch in an email interview. “The vision of Twelve Labs is to help developers build programs that can see, listen, and understand the world as we do.”

• Kota, a startup building a platform for companies to manage employee benefits, raised a $5.3M seed round led by EQT Ventures, with previous investors Northzone and Frontline Ventures also investing.
  
  Kota has developed a benefits and insurance management platform for businesses and a health insurance API for customers to embed into their platforms. "We realized there's a whole ecosystem of platforms and tech platforms like HR tools, finance tools who want to or are currently trying to do benefits within their solution, and it tends to be offline and manual under the hood," Kota chief executive Luke Mackey said of the markets it serves, as Forbes highlights.
  

• Tofu, a startup founded this year that uses generative AI to help B2B marketing teams create campaigns and source leads, raised a $5M round led by Index Ventures and including SignalFire, Stage 2 Capital, and Liquid 2 Ventures.
  
  Tofu can create, execute, and measure hyper-personalized campaigns at scale. Whether it’s creating thousands of account-specific emails for ABM (Account Based Marketing) campaigns, or personalizing whitepapers for 20 different industries, Tofu can create high-quality, personalized content that resonates with target customer segments.
  

• 1337 (pronounced "Leet"), a startup founded this year that says it is leveraging generative AI to build a community of AI-driven micro-influencers, raised a $4M pre-seed round from Credo Ventures, GFR Fund, Treble VC, and Roosh Ventures.
  
  We’re excited to unveil 1337, the latest star in the Roosh Ventures portfolio! It’s thrilling to work with such pioneering founders as Robin, backing his bold ideas for the second time.
  

• Klu, a startup that helps companies integrate AI into their apps and workflows, raised a $1.7M pre-seed round led by Firstminute Capital, with participation from a16z, Sequoia Capital, Craft Ventures, and Atomico.
  
  Klu is building an LLM application platform for building, evaluating, and optimizing AI applications and offers a suite of integrated products enabling companies to quickly go from idea to optimized LLM-powered features built on large language models like GPT-4.
  

🔥 Exits:

• Databricks is acquiring Arcion, a startup whose no-code connectors allow enterprise customers to ingest data from a multitude of different sources and applications, for $100M. Once Databricks integrates Arcion’s technology, it should be much easier for clients to add their data from software systems such as Salesforce, Workday, and Oracle, Databricks CPO said.

• Auttomatic, the startup behind WordPress, is acquiring Texts, a universal messaging app, for $50M. Matt Mullenweg, Automattic’s CEO, says Texts is not just a product acquisition but also the beginning of a huge new investment for the company. So far, Automattic’s two main areas of focus have been on publishing and commerce — now, messaging is the company’s third pillar. “I like to pick areas I feel are so fundamental to the human condition that I can work on this the rest of my life,” he says. “Self-publishing, commerce, and messaging cover a good chunk of all human activity, and they’re also three areas where I think an open-source solution is necessary for the long term.”

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The whole carousel is quite nice, look into it!

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💡Innovation Spotlight

• JP Morgan launches a pay-by-bank app: JP Morgan and Mastercard have announced the launch of their Pay-by-Bank open finance solution, giving billers the ability to allow their customers to pay bills directly from their bank account, which brings more speed and security.

• Emotion-detecting AI: The group behind one of the data sets used to train the text-to-image model Stable Diffusion wants to bring emotion-detecting capabilities to every developer — at no cost. LAION, the nonprofit building image and text data sets for training generative AI, including Stable Diffusion, announced the Open Empathic project. Open Empathic aims to “equip open source AI systems with empathy and emotional intelligence,” in the group’s words.

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📈 Insightful Data

An unexpected slowdown: While most major economies are experiencing growth, Germany’s economic outlook is gloomy. In fact, the IMF predicts that Germany will see its GDP shrink by 0.5% and become the worst-performing major economy this year, while the US and Eurozone GDP is about to grow by 6% and 3% respectively.

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Venturized is compiled and written by Ivan Taranenko, Associate at Roosh Ventures.

Roosh Ventures is a Kyiv-based entrepreneurs-led, generalist VC firm investing in Pre-seed to Series A across EU and US markets. Powered by Roosh. 

Join the Roosh Ventures fam on 🐥 Twitter and 🔗 Linkedin. More about Roosh Ventures and its portfolio companies on 🌐 roosh.vc.