AI Agents Takeover Coding, Finance & Health

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∆ Tech in the News

Human Artists Unite - 200+ pop stars including Billie Eilish, Stevie Wonder, Katie Perry, and Nicki Minaj signed an open letter calling for an end to AI music tools that “infringe upon and devalue the rights of human artists.”

A Neutral Net - The FCC is expected to reinstate Obama-era net neutrality rules removed by Trump. ISPs would be sanctioned for slowing, blocking, or charging for premium internet speed rates.

AI News Exit - Yahoo acquired Artifact, Instagram founder Mike Krieger’s AI news aggregation app. It will now reach 185M monthly Yahoo News readers.

Generative Revenue Search - Google is considering charging for its AI-powered search capabilities by adding SGE to its premium subscription service.

AI vs Sepsis - The FDA approved the first algorithmic, AI-driven diagnostic tool to predict the risk of sepsis, a condition claiming 350k U.S. lives a year.

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The Hottest Thing in Tech this Week

AI Agents Takeover Coding, Finance & Health

Hot on the heels of Cognition Labs’ viral success with coding assistant Devin, a new wave of AI Agents is disrupting the world, including in the low-hanging fruit of coding agents, as well as in Finance, medicine, and customer service.

Devin Has Company

Princeton NLP just revealed SWE-agent, an open-source system that turns GPT-4 into an AI software engineering agent that can autonomously solve issues in GitHub repositories. On the SWE-bench benchmark, it achieved accuracy on par with Devin, resolving 12.29% of issues by itself in an average time of just 93 seconds. Also, earlier this week, leading coding startup Replit launched Code Repair, a low-latency programming AI agent that claims to autonomously fix code in the background as developers work.

Medical Machines

Nvidia recently ruffled a few feathers in March when it announced a partnership with AI Medtech startup Hippocratic to replace nurses with AI Agents to perform "low-risk," "patient-facing" tasks to mitigate staffing shortages. They claim the robots would cost providers just $9 an hour, barely above the US minimum wage, and well below the average hourly wage for registered nurses.

Personal Investing Copilot

Another logical use case for AI Agents is the financial world. Last week, San Fran Fintech Portal launched RAFA - an AI Agent-driven copilot for personalized investment insights. RAFA claims to be the first “intelligent investment app” capable of providing financial intelligence across traditional assets, ETFs, mutual funds and bonds, and digital assets (including NFTs). Built by a team of former Nvidia AI engineers, RAFA utilizes a team of AI Agents to continuously analyze millions of data points to inform models for users' portfolios.

Agent APIs

A takeaway for builders and investors is to pay attention to the underlying models and systems that power the agents. OpenAI Function Calling is powering many, but Anthropic just released Claude 3 Native Tool Use. These models provide the critical thinking and holistic awareness required by agents. Then there are the Agent API tools like MultiOn and DAGWorks that allow users to embed custom AI agents in their own applications or infrastructure.

This is just the tip of the iceberg.

Want to see a deeper dive on the AI Agent ecosystem?

Reply “YES, DEEP DIVE” or “NO”: [email protected]

Deals We’re Watching

Founders to Watch and Opportunities to Catch

Open Deals:

Looking to invest? Let us know if you want a warm intro —> [email protected]

1. AI Employee Recruitment App - San Francisco - Platform enhancing enterprise HR functions including recruitment and retention through automated person matching. Founder closed 8 figure exit from last startup. (Pre-Seed)

2. AI Employee Fleet - NYC - based business software to generate a fleet of job-specific AI employees for task execution and data interaction, backed by Tribe. (Seed+)

3. OPEN FUND - San Francisco - A crypto fund by Coinbase co-founder and former Sequoia partner raising a new $750M-$800M fund, following on from the $2.5B fund it raised in Nov. 2021 before the crash.

4. AI/ML for Healthcare Admin Billing - Los Angeles - Simplify health documentation with translatable billing and QA for faster Dx coding. Post revenue. 20 Major healthcare clients in pipeline. Serial entrepreneur/founder of medical group. (Seed)

5. Enterprise Workflow Solution - UK - Productivity software to drive compliance and streamline operations with mobile and wearable integrations. Longterm contracts with top-tier clients like Bayer, Petrofac, and Goodyear. (Seed+)

Raising for your startup? Send us your Open Round —> [email protected]

Closed Deals:

Social Commerce - LA social marketplace startup Flip raised $144M led by Streamlined Ventures including $50M from AppLovin at a $1.05B valuation.

Brim Full - Toronto credit card FinTech Brim Financial closed its $85M Series C to fund a U.S. expansion, develop its product, & seek strategic alliances.

On-Chip ML - San Jose startup SiMa added $70M to its Series B to advance its’ ML system-on-chip (SoC) to bring multimodal AI to edge computing devices.

Homebase - The San Francisco company raised a $60M Series D backed by Bain and Khosla for its’ app simplifying management of hourly teams for SMBs.

AI Data Pipelines - Phoenix startup Datavolo raised a $21M Series A led by General Catalyst to develop stable and secure multimodal data pipelines for AI using the NSA-developed Apache NiFi.

Companies to Watch:

Legal Tech - UK startup Luminance’s ARR is up ~5x in 2 yrs and it serves Koch, Hitachi, Yokogawa, LG Chem, and BBC. A $40M Series B led by March Capital, National Grid Partners, and Slaughter and May will expand its U.S. presence. 

Rubrik - The Palo Alto cloud and data security startup filed for an IPO targeting $500-$700M. Rubrik’s ARR surged 47% in 2023 and it serves 6k+ clients including Goldman Sachs, Barclays, Home Depot, Pepsi, & the Broncos.

The Funding Buzz

Tiger Global Management - Investors committed ~$2.2B for a new venture fund, this is well short of a $6B target and its smallest haul in roughly a decade.

Kamco Invest - The Kuwaiti asset manager raised $50M to back emerging Silicon Valley fund managers. Kamco will connect startups to Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds in exchange for access to the best U.S. deals.

GGV Capital - The cross-border U.S. / China VC firm has officially split and rebranded as Notable Capital in the U.S. and Granite Asia in Singapore.

DCVC - The Silicon Valley VC firm raised a $500M climate fund over a year.

Trending Tools and Buzzy Tech

Tools

Apple - Spatial Personas expands on Vision Pro 3D avatar personas.

OpenAI - Edit DALL-E 3 images directly within ChatGPT.

Stable Audio 2.0 - Make songs up to 3 mins long from a single text prompt.

Tech

Microsoft + Quantinuum - “most reliable” quantum computing system yet.

Apple - “Next big thing” is home robots and automated home devices.

LLM Talk - S-Bert creates AI models that talk to each other and pass on skills.

That’s a wrap! As a Tech Buzz Member, we are giving you the opportunity to have a first look at our deck before we go live with the round. Click the link here to view the deck if you have not done so already.