7 Key Insights from The Recursives State of AI in CEE Report

Pitch Deck: Synthesia Raises $180 Million at $2 1 Billion Valuation

Amodei previously worked at OpenAI for about four years, leaving with the title of vice president of research. According to the European Commission, 85% of AI systems developed by European AI companies are categorized as “minimal risk,” meaning they will face less regulatory scrutiny. This regulatory landscape could favor innovation and help drive AI development in the region. By August 2024, Poland had secured €170M in AI funding, leading the region. Croatia, with impressive investments from Verne, continues to shine, while Hungary is also making significant strides, nearing 50% of its 2023 funding total.

A startup bringing generative artificial intelligence to business processes. And a company focused on “artificial physical intelligence” to make robots as simple to control as chatbot assistants. Investment firm KKR predicts that soaring demand for data centers to support AI will boost global spending in the sector to $250 billion a year. From generating personalized how-to videos at scale to creating unimaginable aerospace designs, the power of generative AI is undeniable. While it’s clear that AI won’t replace humans anytime soon, there’s no doubt that humans who learn to use AI proficiently will gain a huge advantage.

Roughly 75% of that value will emanate from productivity gains across customer operations, sales and marketing, software engineering, and R&D. Accelsius, a startup developing efficient data center cooling systems, announced a $24 million Series A funding round this week. The startup has a proprietary two-phase, direct-to-chip liquid system for data centers handling high-performance computing. Improving AI performance through reinforcement learning from human feedback added a travel assistant feature to travel publisher Matador Network.

Backed by the likes of Inflection Point Ventures, CRED founder Kunal Shah, among others, Intellemo has raised more than $350K in funding till date. Backed by 100X.VC and LetsVenture as well as other angel investors and family offices, the Gujarat-based Kroop AI has secured $230K in funding to date. Backed by Better Capital, the Bengaluru-based startup counts names such as Truecaller, CallHippo among others as its clients.

It currently claims to offer the functionality in 60 Indian and other global languages. Dubverse.ai’s text-to-speech engine also offers a broad range of AI voices as per the tone and style needs of its customers. Founded in 2021 by Varshul Gupta and Anuja Dhawan, Dubverse.ai harnesses the power of GenAI to help brands and video producers dub their video content. The platform helps its clients convert text into “natural-sounding” voice overs in multiple languages and generate subtitles. Founded in 2020 by Akshay Gugnani and Kanishk Shukla, Expertia AI is an AI-powered HR Tech platform that offers end-to-end hiring solutions from talent discovery to decision.

Is the startup using a mostly off-the-shelf LLM — e.g., OpenAI’s ChatGPT —or a meaningfully customized LLM? Different ways to customize an LLM include fine-tuning an off-the-shelf model or building a custom one using an open-source LLM like Meta’s Llama. Greater customization generally increases AI accuracy and reflects the startup’s technical expertise in AI. Given the noise in the market and the large field of enterprise generative AI startups, it can be challenging for enterprise customers and investors to evaluate and differentiate among the options. These AI-driven solutions are beginning to realize the projected global economic impact by significantly reducing operating expenses, generating sales and boosting employee productivity. According to a report by McKinsey, generative AI could have an economic impact of $2.6 trillion to $4.4 trillion annually.

A new line of defense: Cybersecurity startup Zynap raises €5.7 million for threat intelligence

Their AI hardware is designed to optimize the performance of machine learning models, making it easier for businesses to implement AI technologies. With strong backing from investors like SoftBank and Alphabet, SambaNova is on track to become a leader in AI hardware solutions. A December regulatory filing showed that the Burlingame, Calif.-based startup raised about $6 billion in equity financing. Also that month, xAI revealed that it started rolling out a new version of the Grok-2 GenAI chatbot to users of Musk’s social media company X–formerly Twitter–and improved its image generation capabilities. The San Francisco-based vendor positions its technology as capable of building GenAI into any business process.

Founded in August 2022, the company rapidly grew to 2 million monthly active users within just four months. Outerbase is an interface for the database, a database management platform that simplifies data visualization and collaboration for teams, even without extensive database expertise. By democratizing data access, it encourages data-driven decision-making across the entire organization. AQEMIA is a groundbreaking pharmatech company that uses quantum physics and generative AI to revolutionize the drug discovery process. Their unique technology accelerates the process by 10,000 times, generating an extensive range of new drug candidates without relying on experimental data.

Want to keep track of the largest startup funding deals in 2024 with our curated list of $100 million-plus venture deals to U.S.-based companies? AI is not just a trend; it’s the foundation for the next generation of technological advances. Companies that use AI technology are poised for massive growth in the coming years, making them attractive investment opportunities. FactoryOps is the name Guidewheel gives its artificial intelligence-powered platform for measuring equipment performance and forecasting production volumes and delivery dates. Taking on Zendesk, Atlassian Jira, Salesforce Service Cloud and other popular products, DevRev positions its cloud-based, AI-native platform as a way to unify customer support and product development. For this list, CRN considered companies founded in 2018 or later and ones with impressive funding rounds in the later part of 2024 that should help carry them through an ever-competitive AI landscape in 2025.

Competitive Advantage 3: A Digital Peer To Support Your Best Talent

He was previously caught up in the leadership turmoil at OpenAI in late 2023, when the organization’s board–including Sutskever–ousted CEO Sam Altman, only for Altman to return days later. Sutskever changed his mind and later signed a letter demanding Altman’s return, according to Reuters. Other publishers including Adweek, The Los Angeles Times and Lee Enterprises have entered partnerships with Perplexity.

• India is becoming a key producer of AI for virtually every industry — powered by thousands of startups that are serving the country’s multilingual, multicultural population and scaling out to global users.
• Deal flow fell from 1,211 rounds announced in Q2 to only 947 in Q3 — a 22% decline.
• The Google for Startups Cloud AI Accelerator is a 10-week program for AI startups in the U.S. and Canada.
• The platform is supported by marquee investors such as Zoom, Bossanova Investimentos, Y Combinator, Menlo Ventures, and Nexus Venture Partners.
• Its application, MendoGPT, is specifically designed for the adoption of generative AI in tools such as Microsoft Copilot 365.
• For this list, CRN considered companies founded in 2018 or later and ones with impressive funding rounds in the later part of 2024 that should help carry them through an ever-competitive AI landscape in 2025.

Papercup’s synthetic voices sound genuinely human, enabling quicker turnaround times and reduced costs compared to traditional dubbing methods. Additionally, their team of translators ensures the accuracy of each word. As a Premium user you get access to the detailed source references and background information about this statistic.

To a great degree, the largest rounds of the year went to a handful of AI companies working on large language models and underlying technologies to scale them. And it so happens that these startups are highly concentrated in Northern California. Musk’s AI startup is a rival to OpenAI and has been marketed to Silicon Valley investors through a pitch deck that showcases the entrepreneur’s track record at Tesla Inc. and SpaceX Corp., the report suggests.

After graduation, startups join the Google for Startups Accelerator community, where they will receive ongoing support and can build connections with like-minded founders, mentors and investors. To help AI-focused startups scale quickly while building responsibly, we’re announcing the launch of the Google for Startups Cloud AI Accelerator. This program builds on the success of our recent AI First accelerators and targets startups building AI solutions based in the U.S. and Canada. If a startup has backing from well-known venture capital firms or industry leaders, it’s often a good sign of future success.

Slite is a contemporary knowledge base platform designed to help teams combat information overload and thrive in remote work environments. Established in 2016, Slite transcends traditional note-taking and knowledge management by focusing on fostering happiness at work, all with the help of generative AI technologies. Because of this, one must be careful with startups in the generative AI space that seem too amazing to be true. Many of them will overpromise and underdeliver, ultimately disappearing from the market. What we’re interested in are companies that are undeniably good, provide clear value, and solve actual problems.

Northern California’s combination of deep-tech talent, strong embedded networks, rich capital resources and powerhouse universities remains unrivaled in its ability to scale transformative startups. It’s still the place where investors spend the largest share of their money, by a long shot. Other states with investors’ favored AI companies also gained in the rankings.

The Largest AI Startup Funding Deals Of 2024 – Crunchbase News

The Largest AI Startup Funding Deals Of 2024.

Posted: Thu, 02 Jan 2025 08:00:00 GMT [source]

These 3 founders are using AI to analyze patients’ biological profiles and recommend drugs. Here’s the 15-slide pitch deck they used to raise $5 million backed by Microsoft. These are some of the pitch decks that founders have recently used to raise millions for their AI startups, from top investors such as Temasek, Insight Partners, Alven, Index Ventures, and more. It’s possible that it’s just another bubble, akin to the short-lived Web3 fad of 2022.

Receive dedicated and personalized guidance from executive, go-to-market, and technical mentors matched to your industry vertical and technical needs. At least 95,000 workers at U.S.-based tech companies were laid off in mass job cuts in 2024, per a Crunchbase News tally, and the cuts are continuing… Understanding and testing the STT/TTS offerings, such as support for industry jargon or dialects, is important if the AI solution has voice applications. During that period, the world’s leading high-performance GPU maker has used its ballooning fortunes to significantly increase investments in all sorts of startups but particularly in AI startups. The ChatGPT desktop app for macOS, in early beta, is starting to work with developer tools such as VS Code, Xcode, Terminal, and iTerm 2, the startup said. The update is available to ChatGPT Plus and Team users, and will roll out to Enterprise and Edu users in the future.

The UI/UX should be intuitive enough to require no training for business users, and even for implementation, developer training should take no more than a few days. A distinguishing feature of enterprise generative AI is that the AI system can interact directly with enterprise systems, e.g., Salesforce 1 , SAP, etc. This is primarily done through APIs, so broader and deeper API integrations will allow the AI system to provide more process automation. Mistral recently signed a contract with a NASDAQ-listed blue-chip company and also inked a multi-million euro deal with French media company Agence France-Presse to incorporate its articles into its chatbot.

Founded in 2021 by Ishaan Bhola and Mukunda NS, Contlo is a GenAI-powered martech platform that helps businesses run and optimise end-to-end marketing campaigns. Backed by investors like Stellaris Venture Partners, Google, IFC, and Pi Ventures, the Faridabad-based company has raised a total funding of $5 Mn to date. One formidable hurdle to widespread generative AI adoption is the technology’s massive computational requirements. Some of the biggest winners in Q3 were coding assistant Magic ($320 million in August), enterprise search provider Glean ($260 million in September), and business analytics firm Hebbia ($130 million in July).

In email marketing campaigns, AI can craft compelling subject lines, engaging body content and effective calls-to-action to increase open rates and customer interaction. Investment into startups using or creating artificial intelligence hit a record high in 2021, with $113.3 billion poured into the sector, per Dealroom data. Three years later, investor appetite for the technology is still rife, with venture capitalists putting $84 billion into AI startups globally in 2024, according to PitchBook.

Generative AI startup Synthesia has secured $180 million in a Series D funding round led by venture firm NEA. We may be standing on the precipice of an exhilarating new phase of travel startup investment. All indications are that it could be drastically different for both startups and their investors. The SaaS startup claims that its APIs and bots can be integrated across platforms within seconds. Its clients can also build their own bot for transcribing, summarising and extracting other insights and analysis from audio recordings. Founded in 2022 by Devyani Gupta, Chinmay Shah, and Lalit Gupta, Arrowhead is a enterprise tech startup that utilises GenAI to capture insights from sales calls to improve conversion rates and experience.

Minimal risk AI systems

Worse still, these conductances can drift over time and shift with temperature. This noise drowns out the signal representing the result, and the noise can be compounded stage after stage through the many layers of a deep neural network. Henriksson cites the example of H, a French LLM developer that recently raised $220 million. “At the moment, it is still the AI infrastructure layer that is being built.

Edge computing is a rapidly growing market, and Syntiant is one of the top AI startups creating solutions for this sector. Their low-power AI chips allow devices to process data at the edge – on the device itself – rather than relying on cloud computing. With the rising need for AI solutions that can handle large-scale, enterprise-level tasks, SambaNova Systems is positioning itself as one of the top AI startups to invest in.

As more industries adopt edge computing, Syntiant’s innovative AI chips make it a top choice for investors. With generative AI expected to play a massive role in the future of content creation, Runway’s innovative tools make it an attractive investment opportunity for those looking to invest in AI’s impact on creativity. Investors looking to capitalize on the trend of businesses adopting AI to enhance operations should consider DataRobot as a compelling startup for long-term growth.

But proponents say AI has broader use cases and few similarities to crypto’s “cynical business models.” AI was also alive and well long before the current hype around generative AI. Victor Kristof is the co-founder and CEO of DemoSquare, a Swiss-based startup automating the monitoring and analysis of political and regulatory data with AI. Su also points to a growing sense of caution in China’s AI sector, describing it as a “bubble in the making”.

Founded in 2017 by Ganesh Gopalan and Ananth Nagaraj, Gnani.ai offers a full-stack conversational AI product suite to help businesses automate and enhance customer support across all digital and conventional communication channels. The New York-headquartered startup was founded back in 2015 by Neerav Parekh and Naimisha Neerav Parekh. VPhrase has raised $2 Mn in funding till date and counts Falcon Edge Capital, Bharat Innovation Fund, Alpha Wave Global, among others as its backers. While Phrazor is a report automation tool that converts complex graphs into actionable taking points, Explorazor helps users perform root cause analysis across multiple datasets via a No-SQL interface. The startup has raised $2.2 Mn in funding till date and is backed by the likes of Unicorn India Ventures, Pentathlon Ventures and 100X.VC.

AI’s eye-popping potential has given rise to numerous enterprise generative AI startups focused on applying large language model technology to the enterprise context. Standard products include employee copilots, content generation for marketing, back-office automation and enterprise knowledge search. Writer’s platform is designed to help businesses use large language models to improve workflows and offers AI solutions that can execute complex enterprise operations across systems and teams. The new cash will be used for the company’s quick-start AI applications and agents for workflows in healthcare, retail and financial services. AI startups in CEE are aligned with global trends, specializing in machine learning, big data, computer vision, and natural language processing (NLP).

That wouldn’t do in a digital circuit, because it would slow computation to a crawl. But because the analog computation is done all at once, it doesn’t hinder the speed. Most of Citi Ventures’ portfolio companies have integrated AI to some degree, Carbonara said. While some have added generative AI to a meaningful extent, the majority of interest is in the category of native AI, he said, with application companies beginning to break out with real revenue.