7/14/23

🚀 Weekly Tech Highlights

A New Record Prime Day for Amazon, with $12.7B in Sales - Amazon's Prime Day event in the US saw consumers spend a record-breaking $12.7 billion across two days, with the first day alone marking the "single largest sales day in company history".

Newest AI Partnership Announcements: [KPMG], [Shutterstock], [Associated Press], and [Oracle] - This week KPMG is leading the charge with $2B committed to AI adoption in their partnership with Microsoft, and the race is on between LLMs to see who can train their models quicker with validated datasets and real world use cases.

The Good, the Bad, [Ripple] and the Ugly [Maschinsky Arrest] - A landmark day with a final ruling that XRP is not totally a security, while Celsius CEO charged with orchestrating a “scheme to defraud customers”.

UK Adopts “Apple Tap to Pay” Technology as the Next Step in “Contactless Payments” - As a merchant, all you will need is an iPhone XS or later and you will be able to receive payments through NFC technology.

Twitter opens the doors to Influencer Revenue with a Huge Announcement for Verified Twitter Creators - The first payments started streaming to the Stripe accounts of top verified Twitter creators in a move spurred by the recent competition from Threads as the fight for platform adoption intensifies.

🧠The hottest thing in tech this week

xAI Finally Emerges as Musk's Latest AI Venture to Unravel the Universe's True Essence

xAI, a new company led by Elon Musk, aims “to understand the true nature of the universe”. The team includes experts from DeepMind, OpenAI, Google Research, Microsoft Research, Tesla, and the University of Toronto, who have contributed widely used methods in the field of AI.

Not much else is known other than breadcrumbs dropped on Twitter and the formation of xAI linked to Elon’s statements of “TruthGPT” and his growing fear of the existential crisis AGI presents to humanity. They will be hosting a Twitter spaces today at 1pm PST.

🔓Deals Unlocked

Founders to Watch and Opportunities to Catch

Closed Deals:

1. AI Democratization by Nomic - Raising $17M led by Coatue, Nomic, valued at $100M, aims to enhance visibility in AI model training and democratize access to AI models, providing open-source alternatives to those from AI giants like OpenAI and Google.

2. Infinite Canvas's AI Game Revolution - Infinite Canvas, after raising $6M in funding led by Bitkraft, plans to further integrate generative AI into games like CreatureCraft on Discord, transforming players into creators and offering unique, player-designed cards.

3. CapStack's Bank-To-Bank Marketplace - CapStack, ran by Pipe co-founder Michal Cieplinski, has raised $6M in a round led by Fin Capital to build an integrated banking OS, facilitating portfolio visibility and investment amongst financial institutions with over 60 banks onboard even prior to product launch.

Companies on the rise:

1. [Open Round] Community-Driven AI Surge by Hugging Face - With a potential valuation of $4 billion in an anticipated Series D funding round, Hugging Face is cashing in on the power of its developer friendly community and proven open-sourced AI models.

2. [IPO Watch] The OpenAI competitor You’ve Never Heard of - Canadian LLM and Generative AI startup Cohere, recently announced a major partnership with Oracle, and has raised $400M+ to redefine enterprise AI solutions.

3. AI-Boosted Drug Discovery Secures Significant Backer - Hint: It’s Nvidia and they just invested $50M to power use of Nvidia's advanced generative AI cloud service.

4. Zluri's Next-Gen SaaSOps - Backed by Lightspeed and having closed a recent a Series B funding round and backed by $32M total, Zluri is well positioned to improve enterprise efficiency with its intelligent assistant CoPilot.

5. Simbe's Shelf-Scanning Robotics - The retail robotics space is getting more and more crowded yet Simbe shows promise committing to a partnership with a major retailer this year prior to closing their Series B.

Based on overwhelming interest, we are now accepting deals and portfolio company news at this FORM.

We pride ourselves on finding the latest and best tech news and deals and our hope is that these submissions will only serve to accelerate that process!

As we close out a week filled with significant fundings, powerful partnerships, and AI advancements, remember that these market shifts are forging our future - one algorithm, one investment, and one disruptive innovation at a time.

The Tech Buzz Team

mailto:[email protected]