đź“Ś 6 AI Startups raise $400M+

BONUS: Sequoia Capital on o1

October 17, 2024

TODAY’S FUNDING RECAP 🗓️

  • Lightmatter raises a $400M Series D — Photonic chips for AI data centers

  • Agency raises a $12M Seed — AI agents for customer success

  • E2B raises a $11.5M Seed — Sandox for AI-generated code

  • Tako raises a $5.75M Seed — AI data vizualization

  • 2 more rounds caught by my funding tracker

Read time: 3 minutes

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TOP PICKS 📢

1/4

Amount: $400M 🎉

Valuation: $4.4B

Round: Series D

Lead Investor: T. Rowe Price

Lightmatter’s primary product is called "Passage," a next-generation optical networking solution that leverages silicon photonics.

Passage accelerates data transmission between data center chips by reducing the number of networked switches typically required. GPUs spend a significant amount of time idle, waiting for data to pass through a hierarchy of network switches. Passage flattens this hierarchy, enabling faster data transfer by connecting GPUs through ultra-dense optical fibers that offer bandwidth speeds up to 100 terabits per second—100x faster than current data center capabilities.

2/4

Amount: $12M 🎉

Round: Seed

Lead Investor: Sequoia Capital, HubSpot Ventures

Agency is building an AI agent for customer success managers.

Their agent handles operational tasks including follow-ups, note-taking, customer onboarding, and scheduling meetings, freeing CSMs to focus on strategic initiatives. The AI developed by Agency learns from various sources of customer data, including emails, CRM entries, chat logs, and phone conversations, enabling it to anticipate and address customer needs.

3/4

Amount: $11.5M 🎉

Round: Seed

Lead Investor: Decibel

E2B is an open-source infrastructure that allows you run to AI-generated code in secure isolated sandboxes in the cloud.

Companies use their sandboxes to equip AI agents with code execution capabilities to helps solve problems like hallucinations and unreliability, and E2B’s new Code Interpreter SDK allows developers to add code interpreting to any AI app.

4/4

Amount: $5.75M 🎉

Round: Seed

Lead Investor: Abstract Ventures, A*

Tako is an AI search engine that delivers visual, up-to-date, and shareable knowledge cards.

A user’s natural language search generates shareable, engaging displays you can embed in apps, search, and storytelling. Tako sources their data in real-time from authoritative, vetted providers and supports single-domain searches (e.g. “Nvidia stock price”), cross-domain searches (e.g. “Nvidia stock price vs. Biden approval rating”), and time-based searches (e.g. “Nvidia stock price vs. Biden approval rating since 1/11/22”) across a range of financial, economic, and political data.

Tako can also be integrated into other platforms via API, as demonstrated by its partnership with Perplexity.

OTHER ROUNDS 🤏

ESSENTIAL INTRODUCTIONS

→ Capacity raises a $26M Series D — AI-powered support automation

→ BackOps AI raises a $2M Pre-Seed— AI-powered supply chain management

PITCH DECKS & TOOLS ⚒️

New Pitch Decks

Trending Business Tools

BONUS 🔥

FOR CURIOUS MINDS

Generative AI’s Act o1

The Agentic Reasoning Era Begins.

www.sequoiacap.com/article/generative-ais-act-o1

THAT’S IT FOR TODAY

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