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Venture Capital News
Medium
7d
99
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Speak: The Language-Learning Unicorn Revolutionizing Fluency with AI
- Speak, an AI-powered language-learning platform, has secured new funding for its ambitious expansion plans across Southeast Asia, Europe, and the United States.
- The company aims to add new languages like Spanish and French by the end of next year.
- Speak's virtual tutor, Speak Tutor, utilizes AI to deliver personalized language lessons tailored to each learner's goals, pace, and style.
- They have also introduced 'Speak for Business', an enterprise solution designed to enhance workplace communication skills.
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TechCrunch
7d
91
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Nuon helps companies deploy their software into their customers’ cloud accounts
- Nuon, a 'bring your own cloud' (BYOC) platform, helps SaaS companies deploy their applications and software into customers' cloud accounts.
- Nuon offers a hybrid approach of SaaS and self-hosted deployment, allowing customers to have isolated and deeply integrated software while maintaining control over their data.
- Manual deployment into customers' clouds is expensive and difficult to scale, making Nuon's BYOC infrastructure platform a valuable solution for SaaS companies.
- Nuon recently raised $16.5 million in funding from investors including Uncork Capital, M12, Mantis VC, and Redpoint Ventures.
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Medium
7d
54
Startup Table with AJ: Real life experiences of early-stage founders!
- Startup Table with AJ is a new series hosted by Archana Jahagirdar, founder of Rukam Capital.
- The series aims to highlight the challenges faced by early-stage founders in India and provide practical insights for aspiring entrepreneurs.
- The first episode features a candid conversation with founders from FITTIITD, sharing their motivations and strategies for success.
- Startup Table with AJ celebrates authentic entrepreneurial stories and encourages dialogue in the startup ecosystem.
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Medium
7d
412
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Pushing Past L(LM)its: The AI Evolution of 2024 and What Lies Ahead in 2025
- The year 2024 was a transformative one for the AI industry, marked by groundbreaking product releases, unprecedented levels of funding, and a maturing ecosystem that brought real-world applications to the forefront.
- OpenAI and NVIDIA, two defining companies of the GenAI era, made a profound impact in 2024 with major product releases.
- In 2024, the AI sector saw significant investments across multiple domains, particularly in foundational models, computing infrastructure, and data.
- From our perspective, access to LLM technology and its customization has become significantly more accessible, which is one of the key factors driving its widespread adoption.
- In 2024, NVIDIA sustained its remarkable growth, solidifying its leadership in the AI hardware sector, driven in part by a substantial increase in capital expenditure from hyperscalers.
- On the application side, both consumer and enterprise AI solutions gained substantial traction. In 2024, the application layer of AI experienced significant growth.
- Moreover, we believe that the release of GPT-5 is imminent for 2025.
- A significant challenge for AI in 2025 is data center capacity.
- Start-ups focusing on providing customized GenAI services are poised to benefit immensely from this trend.
- The landscape of work is clearly at an inflection point, and understanding these shifts will be crucial for organizations and individuals alike as they prepare for an AI-augmented future.
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Saastr
7d
0
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Dear SaaStr: Is It a Good Idea to Start a Company with a Good Friend?
- Starting a business with a good friend can be a good idea, but there are important discussions to have beforehand.
- Key discussions include commitment levels, plans for potential challenges and changes in the business, roles as the company scales, and long-term dedication.
- Implementing a long vesting schedule on founders' stock can help protect the most committed founders.
- Successful startups like Mailchimp and Canva have been founded by friends and partners.
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Medium
7d
58
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Invest Smarter, Not Harder: Palcoin Makes Crypto Investments Transparent and Safe
- Palcoin combines AI technology and a community-driven model to provide transparency and safety in crypto investments.
- It tackles the lack of clarity in the crypto space by vetting and verifying projects, making decisions data-backed and visible.
- Investors can see where funds are going and receive free tokens from funded projects.
- Join Palcoin to invest smarter and eliminate the guesswork from crypto investments.
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Medium
7d
208
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The Evolution of AI Software: Wrappers, Platforms, Applications, and Optimization
- The evolution of AI software development has gone through several stages, from GPT wrappers to applications and platforms and now to AI optimization.
- AI platforms, which are frameworks for developing and deploying GenAI workflows or agents, excel in prototyping but are not suitable for customer-facing applications due to their limited optimization and abstracted nature.
- Conversely, AI applications are specialized per vertical or business function and are differentiated based on proprietary data, unique understanding of a vertical, or a technically novel and robust infrastructure.
- To optimize AI software for varying scenarios, there is a need for a standardized set of evaluation metrics, and new companies like Superlinked, Vectorize, and Voyage AI are beginning to address individual components of the optimization process.
- The open-source community has begun developing tooling to address this issue, and the aim is to create a platform that could deliver the most optimal strategy per use case using a complex theory of Bayesian optimization and gradient descent in parallel.
- This field is exciting as it addresses diminishing returns of LLMs regarding quality output vs cost and latency and the need to orchestrate SLMs for enterprise GenAI deployments due to rising compute costs.
- What we hope for in the future is a standard set of metrics that would enable commercial vendors to create such a platform.
- As funding starts flowing back into the AI market, investors are looking for sustainable and structured evolution in AI software development with well-differentiated business value.
- There is already a trend towards AI optimization solutions that support development teams in the complex and ambiguous evaluation process, which is usually a tedious process.
- However, there are still many technical challenges involved in creating such a platform, and the costs associated with bigger models must also be considered.
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Pymnts
1w
819
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AI Companies Receive 42% of US Venture Capital Investment
- Venture capital in the U.S. has moved to artificial intelligence (AI) companies at an “unprecedented” rate.
- 42% of U.S. venture capital was invested into AI companies in 2024, up from 36% in 2023 and 22% in 2022.
- As of 2024, 20 AI companies have each raised $2 billion or more.
- HSBC Innovation Banking expects new waves of growth and tailwinds for returns in the U.S. tech sector due to changes in the acquisition market, deregulation, and fiscal policies.
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TechCrunch
1w
473
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Prequel is building a community-driven approach to finding software bugs
- Prequel is building a community-driven approach to finding software bugs.
- The startup is developing a database of software failure patterns and misconfigurations in Linux workloads.
- Prequel's software checks for bugs and failures by utilizing the database, contributed by a growing community of engineers and developers.
- Prequel has secured a $3.3 million seed round for product development and expanding its detection library.
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Medium
1w
150
Why Stretching the Truth is Bad for Business
- Stretching the truth in business is similar to taking drugs to cover up bad preparation in bodybuilding.
- While stretching the truth may make you look good temporarily, it will ultimately lead to failure.
- Building trust and credibility through results is more important than hype.
- Shortcuts and dishonesty will not lead to success; discipline, honesty, and hard work are key.
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Saastr
1w
247
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Who / What We Are Hiring For at Team SaaStr. Join Us!!
- Team SaaStr is currently hiring for several positions:
- 1. Director of Content: Responsible for managing a significant portion of the content calendar, including speakers and webinars.
- 2. Director of Growth: In charge of email campaigns and a multi-million dollar revenue target.
- 3. Senior Sales Exec, Sponsor Sales: Opportunity to close $2m+ partner/sponsor sales and work with great brands.
- 4. Director of Events: Responsible for owning and managing SaaStr Annual, Europa, and APAC events.
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TechCrunch
1w
321
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Jay-Z’s Marcy Venture Partners merges with investment arm of Pendulum Holdings
- Jay-Z's venture capital firm, Marcy Venture Partners, has merged with Pendulum Holdings' investment arm Pendulum Opportunities, forming MarcyPen Capital Partners.
- The newly formed MarcyPen Capital Partners manages $900 million in assets.
- MarcyPen Opportunities Fund II, formerly known as Pendulum Opportunities' Fund II, is currently raising a $250 million fund and has already secured over $100 million.
- Marcy Venture Partners, co-founded by Jay-Z, Jay Brown, and Larry Marcus, has previously invested in companies such as Partake Foods, Spatial Labs, and Savage x Fenty.
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Medium
1w
355
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Joyce Shen’s picks: musings and readings in AI/ML, December 16, 2024
- China establishes AI standards committee amid global tech race.
- New tests uncover AI's ability for deception.
- Apollo Research uncovers scheming capabilities of frontier models.
- Victims raise concerns over AI-generated fake nudes causing harm.
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Guardian
1w
217
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Labour’s gamble with Royal Mail may go horribly wrong | Nils Pratley
- Labour’s U-turn from renationalising Royal Mail to supporting its leveraged takeover by Czech billionaire Dan Křetínský has raised concerns among experts. National Postal Services have been privatised in several European countries without inviting overseas ownership, due to the critical infrastructure they provide despite the rise of digital communication. Although Křetínský has promised good investments, his undertakings are laughably weak; for instance, one restriction on EP UK Bidco, Křetínský’s takeover vehicle solely managing Royal Mail, only requires it to equal last year's on-time delivery of letters, which they had just been fined over £10m for. This debt-inspired deal has an aggressive capital structure, and the Czech businessman focuses on the property portfolio (£1bn surplus in the pension fund) and growth from GLS in the Netherlands, where the Royal Mail owner’s actual value lies.
- The deal is a surprise for Royal Mail, which has been appealing for years for reform of the Universal Service Obligation (USO) to reduce costs and reflect the decline in the volume of letters since privatisation. Now it is on the verge of achieving this, but is being sold to distant owners who have a huge appetite for debt. Labour has no excuse if this gamble goes wrong.
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Medium
1w
50
Image Credit: Medium
Firms That Raise Capital Need Transparency for Customers
- Firms specializing in raising capital have seen increased demand as businesses seek innovative funding methods.
- Transparency is crucial in the capital-raising process to ensure clients understand the steps taken and decisions made.
- StartingPoint provides a comprehensive solution for financial services and capital-raising firms, offering transparency and streamlined communication.
- Transparency facilitated by StartingPoint enhances the capital-raising process and helps build long-term relationships.
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