The Billion-Dollar AI Club

The kind of cash flooding into AI startups in the US is downright jaw-dropping! Recently, Ilya Sutskever’s Safe Superintelligence Inc (SSI) secured a whopping $1 billion in funding from NFDG, a16z, Sequoia, DST Global, and SV Angel, led by Nat Friedman and SSI chief Daniel Gross—an insane feat for a three-month-old venture. The newly-minted company has plans to scale computing power and build a highly trusted team of researchers and engineers focused on safe AGI, split between Palo Alto, California and Tel Aviv, Israel. 

In May this year, Elon Musk’s xAI raised $6 billion in Series B funding from Valor Equity Partners, Vy Capital, a16z, Sequoia Capital, Fidelity, and Al Waleed bin Talal Al Saud at a valuation of $24 billion, making it the second most-valuable generative AI company in the world after OpenAI. Meanwhile, OpenAI is reportedly in talks with Apple and NVIDIA to raise funding in the upcoming round, led by Thrive Capital, taking the value of the company to $100 billion. Rival Anthropic has raised $9.7 billion so far, and is valued at $18.4 billion after its last raise. When it comes to funding, it has raked in more than xAI’s hefty $6.4 billion, but its valuation doesn’t quite pack the same punch. 

Last month, xAI released Grok-2 and Grok-2 mini, its advanced AI models with enhanced text and vision understanding, available to 𝕏 Premium users and developers via an upcoming enterprise API platform. Anthropic, on the other hand, has been the talk of the town with the release of its Claude Artifacts, which has been touted as an App Store killer. 

Cursor, an AI accelerator tool, developed by Anysphere, is also making waves for helping developers code seamlessly. The company landed $60 million in Series A funding from Thrive Capital, OpenAI, and a16z. Ironically, a lot of developers, both experienced and beginners, are leveraging Cursor with Anthopic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet model more than OpenAI’s ChatGPT to build useful applications. 

10x the Stakes

Last year, French startup Mistral AI stunned everyone by pulling in $113 million in just four weeks of existence, setting what seemed like an unbeatable record for seed funding. But the game has changed fast and the stakes have gone much, much higher in no time at all. 

So far, Mistral AI has raised $1.18 billion from Lightspeed Venture Partners, NVIDIA, La Famiglia, Databricks Ventures, General Catalyst, Sofina, a16z, BNP Paribas, Bpifrance, Motier Ventures, Salesforce, IBM Ventures, Korelya Capital, and Emerson Collective at a $6 billion valuation (Series B). 

With Sutskever’s AGI safety startup raking in $1 billion, all eyes are now on Andrej Karpathy’s Eureka Labs, which aims to make education accessible for all with the help of generative AI. Recently, Karpathy said that he is looking to launch his product by year-end. It was only a matter of time before he made it to ‘The Billion-Dollar AI Club’. 

Besides OpenAI, xAI, Anthropic, Mistral AI, and SSI, other companies that have raised billions in funding include AI hyperscaler CoreWeave ($12.1 billion), Scale AI ($1.6 billion), Inflection ($1.5 billion), and Groq ($1 billion) among others. 

The waitlist: Cohere, has so far raised $942.9 million in funding from Index Ventures, NVIDIA, Raquel Urtasun, Geoffrey Hinton, Salesforce Ventures, Radical Ventures and others, at a $5.5 billion valuation (Series D). 

NVIDIA rival Cerebras Systems has raised $ 715 million from Eclipse Ventures, Foundation Capital, Benchmark, Altimeter Capital, Sequoia Capital, and Abu Dhabi Growth Fund among others. 

The outliers: In June this year, EvolutionaryScale raised $142 million in seed funding, led by Nat Friedman, Daniel Gross, and Lux Capital, alongside AWS and NVIDIA also participating in that round. 

This AI startup is focused on using LLMs to create novel proteins and biological systems, with plans to train advanced AI models, build a specialised team, and release its ESM3 models to revolutionise drug discovery and environmental solutions like plastic-degrading microbes.

Where’s India’s AI Billions?

India’s AI funding spree has barely begun. With Indian VCs sitting on $20 billion of dry powder, AI, notably generative AI, is on everyone’s mind, with an anticipation of 100 AI unicorns in the next decade. 

As per AIM Research, in the past six months alone, over 43 Indian AI startups received close to $864 million in funding. Bhavish Aggarwal’s Ola Krutrim leads the pack at $74 million, followed by Sarvam AI and Ema, which have raised $41 million and $36 million in Series A funding, respectively. TWO, on the other hand, has raised over $20 million in seed funding from Jio Platforms and South Korean internet conglomerate Naver.

In stark contrast to global counterparts talking billions, the highest funding here remains a modest $74 million. It’s almost like a ‘10x decel stake’ in the market, with $20 billion in dry powder still waiting to be unleashed. 

Top Stories of the Week >> 

Replit Agents are Here to Replace Software Engineers

The Replit AI team has been cooking some agents. When the developer world was obsessing over Cursor and Claude, Replit Agents took the lead and replaced the need for even AI to write code! 

“AI is incredible at writing code. But that’s not enough to create software. You need to set up a dev environment, install packages, configure DB, and, if lucky, deploy,” founder Amjad Masad said, while announcing the launch of Replit Agent in early access, which is going to automate all of these processes.

Read the full story here. 

Anthropic’s Claude Could be Amazon’s Last Hope to Save Alexa

We all know about Amazon’s vested interest in Anthropic or rather a mutual interest. The AI company has not only received $4 billion from the ecommerce giant to advance generative AI, but every iteration and release of Claude models are available on Amazon Bedrock. 

Now, reports claim that Amazon’s new and improved Alexa will be powered by Anthropic’s Claude. This makes one wonder why Amazon would bet big on Anthropic’s AI model rather than its own. Read on. 

Are Chiplets the Answer to the End of Moore’s Law?

As Moore's Law slows down, chiplets are emerging as a promising solution to the increasing demands of the AI and semiconductor industries. These smaller, scalable components offer a way to boost computing power without being constrained by traditional chip sizes. Startups like d-Matrix and Tenstorrent are leading the charge, using chiplets for AI inference and training, while India's Netrasemi is leveraging it to build powerful edge servers. Read more here.

People & Tech >> 

Breaking Through the Noise to Achieve Success with GenAI

With the massive volume of AI solutions at play, separating actual impactful work from all the hype surrounding AI becomes crucial. “There’s just so much noise out there. And there’s so much innovation. It’s hard to tell fact from fiction,” said Edmund DeLussey, global enterprise leader at Genpact, during a keynote at AIM’s MachineCon Summit in New York, throwing light on Genpact’s success mantra with generative AI. 

AI Events: 

NVIDIA AI Summit India

Join the NVIDIA AI Summit India from October 23–25, 2024, at the Jio World Convention Centre in Mumbai to explore AI innovations across generative AI, robotics, supercomputing, and more, with 70% of use cases addressing India's grand challenges. 

Don't miss the fireside chat with NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang on October 24.

Register here to be part of this transformative event.

AIM & NVIDIA Present DevPalooza 4.0: The Ultimate Developer Meetup in Bengaluru

Join us at DevPalooza 4.0 in Bengaluru, powered by AIM and NVIDIA, to dive into hands-on generative AI workshops, explore applications, and network with AI professionals. Click here to register and secure your spot!

Cypher 2024 

World’s biggest AI conference is just around the corner. Mark your calendars for Cypher 20204! The Cypher India edition is scheduled to be held in Namma Bengaluru from September 25 to 27, while Cypher US will be held in Santa Clara, California from November 21 to 22, 2024. 

What are you waiting for? Register today! 

Cypher 2024 | India | USA 

AI Nuggets >> 

• DeepSeek AI recently launched DeepSeek-V2, a powerful mixture-of-experts (MoE) language model with 236B parameters, offering improved performance and efficiency over its predecessor while cutting training costs by 42.5%. 

• Qualcomm, Samsung, and Google recently collaborated on a mixed reality smart glasses device, announced in February 2023 and reportedly inspired by Apple’s Vision Pro. 

• India’s Semiconductor Mission has approved five major units with INR 76,000 crore investment, creating over 80,000 jobs, with projects from Micron, Tata Electronics, Kaynes Semicon, and more. 

• Tesla recently filed a new patent for its upcoming Robotaxi, featuring wireless charging through station pads, allowing Tesla Robotaxis to operate 24/7 without human intervention. 

• Sakana AI has raised $100M in Series A funding, with support from NVIDIA and top investors, to drive AI research in Japan, focusing on nature-inspired intelligence and evolutionary optimisation. 

• Groq recently launched LLaVA v1.5 7B, a multimodal visual model combining language and vision capabilities, boasting over 4x faster response times than GPT-4o. 

• Google DeepMind launched AlphaProteo, an AI system designed to generate novel protein binders, advancing drug design and disease research by creating highly effective treatments.

• All Hands AI, creator of open-source tool OpenDevin (now OpenHands), raised $5 million to enhance AI development agents for bug fixing and test writing. 

• Bengaluru-based AI startup Sarvam AI launched Mayura, a new translation model that addresses English-to-Indic language challenges by preserving colloquial expressions, code-mixing, and gender-specific nuances.