Venturized. June 14th, 2023
A challenge for Nvidia from AMD, ChatGPT's development, Zuck comment on Apple's AR goggles, and a portion of newly closed VC deals.
Interesting news
📢 AMD said its forthcoming most-advanced GPU for artificial intelligence, the MI300X, will start shipping to some customers later this year. AMD’s announcement the last Tuesday represents the strongest challenge to Nvidia, which currently dominates the market for AI chips.
📢 Andreessen Horowitz has combined its finance and consumer investment teams into one, merging what two of the hottest pandemic-era investment categories that have since cooled were.
📢 Mark Zuckerberg's reported reaction to Apple's Vision Pro presentation this week; "Every demo that they showed was a person sitting on a couch by themself." In a companywide meeting with Meta employees, Zuckerberg said, “I think that their announcement really showcases the difference in the values and the vision that our companies bring to this in a way that I think is really important.”
📢 OpenAI announced the release of new versions of GPT-3.5-turbo and GPT-4, the latter being its latest text-generating AI, with a capability called function calling. As OpenAI explains in a blog post, function calling allows developers to describe programming functions to GPT-3.5-turbo and GPT-4 and have the models create code to execute those functions.
📢 The remote work hype close to its ending? Google will consider office attendance records in performance reviews and send reminders to employees with frequent absences, Chief People Officer Fiona Cicconi wrote in a company-wide email. The search giant will also consider new requests to work remotely full-time as exceptions only.
Notable deals
Venture capital:
🚀 Granica, an AI startup whose aim is to help Amazon S3 and Google Cloud customers to eliminate redundant and low-value data and increase data privacy, raised $45M. Investors included NEA and Bain Capital Ventures.
The company’s cloud-native solution operationalizes a next-generation approach to AI efficiency via data reduction and data privacy, enabling AI teams using Amazon S3 and Google Cloud Storage (GCS) to derive maximum value from their ever-growing volumes of training data.
🚀 Contextual AI, an AI startup that allows businesses to generate more contextually-aware answers from LLMs, raised a $20M seed round led by previous investor Bain Capital Ventures, with Lightspeed, Greycroft, SV Angel, Elad Gil, and Harry Stebbings also anteing up.
LLMs have a tendency to make up information with high confidence, and they’re architected in a way that makes it difficult to remove — or even revise — their knowledge base. Contextual AI tackles this problem with its software.
🚀 Griffin, a startup that enables fintechs and brands to embed finance products such as bank accounts into their platforms, raised a $13.5M Series A round led by MassMutual Ventures, with previous investors Seedcamp, Notion Capital, and EQT Ventures also writing checks.
Griffin’s BaaS platform will support fintechs and innovative brands who are looking to embed finance into their existing digital channels, paving the way for a range of features, including bank accounts, access to the UK’s payment rails, cards, an integrated ledger, and automated compliance technology.
🚀 Insify, a startup that provides insurance for SMBs, raised a $10.7M round led by Munich Re Ventures, with Opera Tech Ventures and previous investors Accel, Frontline Ventures, and Visionaries Club also taking a piece of the deal.
Small and medium companies are most often underinsured or don’t have any insurance at all. With Insify, small companies can get a quote directly from the company’s website. In addition to the online form, the company uses advanced analytics to get some additional information about potential customers.
Exits:
🔥 Apple has acquired Mira, an AR startup that makes headsets for other companies and the US military, according to a post from the CEO’s private Instagram account yesterday seen by The Verge and a person familiar with the matter. Apple confirmed the acquisition. Jony Ive, Apple's former design chief, was at one point an adviser to the startup.
🔥 Nasdaq said it’s doling out $10.5B to acquire Adenza, which develops risk-management and related regulatory software for the financial services market. The cash-and-stock deal will extend Nasdaq’s serviceable addressable market (SAM) to $34B the company said in a press release, $10B more than what it is today.
Promising technology
👾 Severe blow from Zoom. Zoom now lets users use AI to catch up on missed meetings. With Zoom IQ — the app’s AI-powered assistant — hosts can now generate summaries of meetings and send them to users through Zoom Team Chat or email, all without actually recording the meetings.
👾 Instacart launches new in-app AI search tool powered by ChatGPT. The new “Ask Instacart” search tool is designed to help customers save time and assist them with shopping questions by offering personalized recommendations.
Insightful data
Augmented and virtual reality demand. While Apple is announcing its own AR product, it’s interesting to see how AR/VR is gaining popularity, with the user number increasing 1.5x from 102M in 2019 to 169M in 2023. And the number is set to grow further:
Meme of the week
