This week’s headlines in the AI world revolved around a new search engine battle with Microsoft and its former partner OpenAI, the mastermind behind ChatGPT, pitted against Google and its prosaic bard.
While the industry titans are clashing, it’s important to understand that there are many more players in the AI space who are innovating. This past week was no exception – with a healthy dose of activity and even a bit of magic, some “injection” (AI), and even a Moonhub.
1. Is it AI or is it magic?
There are those who may feel like modern AI is some form of magic. While this isn’t a technical truth, there’s at least one startup that’s hoping to bring a little magic to the world of AI.
San Francisco-based startup Magic announced $23 million in funding this week. Jadoo is developing technology for software engineering that it refers to as “AI companions.” The technology uses natural language to help programmers better understand and contribute to software development.
“Our mission is to deploy AI to accelerate science and make the world more productive. For decades, technology was just a tool. Soon it will be a companion,” said Eric Co-Founder and CEO of Magic. Steinberger said in a statement. “The adoption of ‘AI assistants’ in the workplace will be as impactful as the industrial revolution, and it is important to get this transition right.”
2. GlossAi Raises $8 Million for Generative Video-AI (V-AI)
Generative AI is all the rage for text and images, and it’s starting to make waves in the world of video as well. Tel Aviv, Israel-based GlossAi announced this week that it has raised $8 million in a seed round of funding.
GlossAi’s promise is an AI technology that can help organizations intelligently produce video content quickly in a fraction of the time it would have taken with traditional video production methods. According to the company, its technology uses billions of data points to analyze hundreds of parameters such as text, tone, pace, facial expressions and audience engagement, enabling its human-like content creation in near real-time. she does.
3. Cognitos brings in $6.8 million to develop generative AI for enterprise automation.
Did we mention that generative AI is hot? Cognitos is another creative AI startup making news this week, raising a $6.8 million seed funding round.
Cognitos is using generative AI to build an enterprise automation platform called Concierge. The platform aims to enable simple creation of what would otherwise be a complex business process.
“We’re unlocking the power of AI for humanity. Now everyone will be able to use generative AI as they want — just with English,” Cognitos founder and CEO Bunny Gill wrote in a statement. It’s time for computers to behave like humans, and humans to stop behaving like machines.”
4. Moonhub Wants to Help Improve Hiring Process with AI, Raises $4.4 Million in Seed
There’s no shortage of startups covered here on VentureBeat that are actively trying to improve the hiring process. Moonhub can now be added to that list.
Moonhub raised $4.4 million in seed funding this week to help the company develop its talent management and recruiting technology. And yes, Moonhub also claims to be using “state-of-the-art generative AI,” according to its FAQ, to help organizations hire talent faster and more successfully.
5. Mattiq Raises $15 Million in Seed Funding to Develop Sustainable Content with AI
Chicago-based Mattiq is applying its AI technology to materials science to help organizations create a new generation of sustainable materials. The company announced this week that it has raised $15 million in a seed round of funding.
Mattiq has set itself a pretty audacious goal: predicting that by 2024, the company will have synthesized and analyzed more than a trillion novel content combinations with the help of its advanced content AI technology.
“From the Stone Age to the Silicon Age, materials discovery has been slow, unpredictable, and limited by the performance of available materials,” Mattiq founder and director Chad Merkin said in a statement. “Matiq is disrupting the status quo, leading to discoveries that enable new technologies at speeds previously unimaginable.”
6. Entropik seeks to boost AI-powered market research with $25 million Series B
AI is also making an impact in market research work.
This week Bengaluru, India-based Entropik announced that it has raised $25 million in a Series B round of funding. The company plans to use the money to expand into the US, European and Asian markets.
Entropik’s technology helps organizations better understand customer preferences. It does this with AI innovations that include eye tracking as well as multiple patents for facial coding. The company claims that its facial coding technology, which captures a user’s facial expressions, can be quantified for accurate emotion analysis.
7. Customer Experience AI Vendor Ushur Raises $50 Million Series C
Santa Clara, California-based Usher is looking to help improve its customer experience automation (CXA) platform with the help of its $50 million Series C round of funding that was announced this week.
The Ushur platform uses AI for a variety of processes and has an approach called “Conversational Apps” that provide a code-free way to build processes that interact between users and the company. is included. Apps use natural language processing as well as AI for automation.
“The previous generation of enterprise automation was designed for infrastructure processes,” said Simha Sadashiva, CEO and co-founder of Ashur, in a statement. “We built Ushur’s AI platform with a different goal in mind: to deliver great customer experiences at scale and deliver meaningful interactions that put customer needs at the center.”
8. MindsDB wants to help organization to get more machine learning in applications.
MindsDB announced this week that it has raised $16.5 million in Series A funding as it continues to build out its open-source machine learning (ML) platform to help organizations build their own AI-powered applications. helps
VentureBeat first covered MindsDB in 2020 when it raised its $3 million seed round. The company has grown in the years since, leveraging integrations with OpenAI and Hugging Face to help bring both creative AI and natural language processing capabilities to database-driven applications.
“Today, there is tremendous interest in the developer community to implement and integrate machine learning into their applications, but the process is complex and expensive,” commented Chetan Puttaganta, general partner at Benchmark, in a statement. “MindsDB is enabling developers from small startups to the world’s largest enterprises by enabling developers to quickly and efficiently run the ML models of their choice with the database of their choice. “