🔥 Anthropic raises $1B+ this year & Qatar invests big in AI

DM on Twitter for Sponsorships

Top picks from last week 🚀 (May 22 - May 28th)

A quick highlight

Anthropic raises a $450M Series C, it’s 3rd round this year bringing total capital raised to $1.05B in 2023

Anthropic, founded by former Open AI researchers & backed by Google, is a leading foundational AI model provider with safety as a core principle. Its flagship model, Claude, powers AI products at Zoom, Notion, and Poe. They’ve made significant advancements with Claude including increasing context windows - essentially, the model’s memory - to 100K tokens. That means that you can input a whole book into a model instead of just a few paragraphs like in ChatGPT.

Anthropic’s leaked pitch deck also shows that the company is going to raise $5B over the next 2 years to double down on self-teaching AI guided by its safety technique known as “constitutional AI” and build a model 10x more powerful than anything available today.

PS: Anthropic is benefitting big time from the proxy war between Google & Microsoft!

Builder.ai raises a $250m Series D led by Qatar Investment Authority (QIA), reaching a $1B+ valuation

Builder.ai is a no-code app builder/agency that powers entrepreneurs & SMB’s. They are like the engineering resource for all your software needs whether it’s a website/mobile app. With this investment, they’ve raised a total of $445M & marked their unicorn status. This announcement comes 2 weeks after raising an undisclosed amount from Microsoft.

As Microsoft's 5th AI investment this year, alongside OpenAI, Humane, Adept, and Spectrums AI, this strategic move aims to integrate Builder.ai into Microsoft Teams, benefiting its 280 million users with seamless software development solutions.

Insider raises $105M led by QIA to accelerate M&A strategies

Insider, an omnichannel marketing platform raises $105M at a $2B valuation from existing investors including QIA & Esas Private Equity. The AI-driven platform analyzes customer journeys to predict behavior and create individualized automation. Some marquee clients of theirs include Singapore Airlines, Estée Lauder, Virgin, Toyota, New Balance, and IKEA.

Insider also recently launched Whatsapp Commerce, which combines immersive web-style experiences and 2-way conversational messaging. This comes as no surprise given Whatsapp's 2 billion active users and an open rate of 99%.

Insider plans to use the funding to fuel growth through M&A strategies that build on the companies existing technology and capabilities.

Axelera AI raises a $50M series A to make chips that power AI applications outside of data centers

Axelera, is a chip manufacturing company that makes it possible to run AI on edge networks. The idea is that if you put limited constraints on cost, power & scalability, then AI is easy to run. But to revolutionize its accessibility, you need AI to run in the most remote/disconnected networks for which you need a more efficient solution that solves the performance and economic needs. According to them, this market alone will be worth around $70B in 2026.

Its round was led by CDP Venture Capital and this round brings its total capital raised to $68.7M. The company expects to launch its chip this year with 100+ enterprises who have signed up for sample testing.

Spellbook raises a $10.9M series A from Moxxie Ventures to review & create legal contracts with AI

Spellbook, an AI copilot for lawyers is trained on billions of lines of legal text and uses GPT-4 and other LLMs to review and suggest terms for your contracts instantly. It also comes with a Word plugin!

Other Events 📢

• Gan.ai raises a $5.25M Seed Round led by Sequoia Capital to personalize videos at scale for your customers. Read more

• Sixfold raises a $6.5M seed round led by Bessemer Venture Partners to automate the underwriting work involved for insurance companies. Read more

• Voice AI raises a $6M seed round to create a real-time speech to voice changing platform (BTW, all those Trump videos online were made using this tool)

• AVA raises a $6M round to create a highly targeted advertising media platform

Chief AI Tool of the Week 📢

Generative fill for Photoshop! Check it out here 👇

Bonus 🔥

For the most curious minds!