AI Startups Raised $458M Last Week
Last week, AI startups raised $458M in venture funding and there were major announcements from Adobe, Apple, Microsoft, and more 👇
🗞️ This Week in AI
Adobe Introduces Firefly Image 3 Foundation Model
- Adobe introduced the Firefly Image 3 Foundation Model, enhancing photorealistic image generation, speed, and creativity in applications like Photoshop and the Firefly web platform. Learn more.
Microsoft introduces the Phi-3 series of small language models
- Microsoft introduces Phi-3, a new series of small language models (SLMs) that perform complex language, coding, and math tasks more effectively than their larger counterparts, using less data and computing resources. Learn more.
Apple introduced OpenELM, a series of on-device, open-source models
- Apple introduced OpenELM, a family of small, open-source AI models designed for on-device operations, enhancing text generation efficiency without requiring cloud connectivity, now available on Hugging Face. Learn more.
🚀 Startups to Watch
Here are a few of our favorite startups to watch this week:
Perplexity - Raised a $63M Series B1 Round
- What they do: Perplexity.ai is an AI-powered search engine and conversational assistant that aims to provide concise and accurate answers to user queries by summarizing and citing relevant information from the web.
- Location: San Francisco, California
We’re excited to announce that we’ve raised $62.7 million in a Series B1 funding led by Daniel Gross. The round also includes Stanley Druckenmiller, NVIDIA, Jeff Bezos, Tobi Lutke, Garry Tan, Andrej Karpathy, Dylan Field, Elad Gil, Nat Friedman, IVP, NEA, Jakob Uszkoreit, Naval… pic.twitter.com/ETbT0Eywy0
— Perplexity (@perplexity_ai) April 23, 2024
FlexAI - Raised a 30M Seed Round
- What they do: FlexAI aims to change the computing paradigm by building dedicated, cost-efficient and open artificial intelligence infrastructure, enabling developers to use machine learning efficiently.
- Location: Paris, France
Parloa - Raised a 66M Series B Round
- What they do: Parloa is a customer service-focused AI platform. Major coprorates like ERGO, Decathlon, Swisslife, and the German Red Cross automate their most important communication channels with Parloa. This allows customer service, primarily on the phone, to be identified within seconds and repetitive tasks to be automated.
- Location: Paris, France
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