We know that profound changes are about to take place in the future, and AI fever continues. In text, pictures, audio, video and other fields, a large number of potential hot companies have emerged, and many innovative applications and very interesting landing scenarios have been born.

The ZhenFund investment team sorted out the introductions of 37 popular AI companies and their founders in different fields, and integrated 87 new AI tools/projects added between February 14th and 21st.

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We have selected 37 popular AI companies in different fields, and briefly introduced the company's establishment time, location, number of users (if available), founding team combination, and financing history . In the selection of companies, we followed the following principles:

- Ecological Niche: Application Layer Company

- Division criteria: by text, picture, sound, video, code, search, dialogue, rather than vertical industry division

- Year selection: For each category, try to select the ones established during the previous booms and those established after 2020 for comparison

- Company selection: cross selection with reference to Sequoia, a16z, Antler and AI Newsletter Lanscape

Text｜Text

Comprehensive scene

2021｜Rytr

Location: SF

What it is: An artificial intelligence-powered writing tool that helps users create high-quality text in seconds

Number of users: more than 5 million (currently mainly 2B)

team:

CEO - Abhi Godara / 1984

- Graduated from Indian IIT, Civil Engineering in 2006

- 2007 MSc from LSE, Management Science

- Consulting + VC (Operation) - After graduation, he worked in Deloitte and KPMG for consulting, basic positions, and the last job before starting a business was the head of operations of a VC

- Founded entrepreneur community HelpTap in 2015

CTO - Atul Yadav / 1988

- Graduated from Bombay University in 2010, majoring in Electronics and Communications (61%)

-Before starting a business, he worked as a developer in several companies, in basic positions

Financing Records:

- Acquired by Copysmith in 2022

2022｜lex.page

Location: LA

Brief introduction: (Every internal construction product) is built based on GPT-3, and currently realizes the following functions: continuation, generation of rebuttals, generation of article outlines, summarization of text, writing in a specific style (only valid for well-known writers), but still keep replenishing

team:

Builder - Nathan Baschez / 1989

- Graduated from UMich in 2011, majoring in Politics and Philosophy

- He has started many businesses in the content field

- Served as Substack VP Product before co-founding Every

- Co-founded Every in 2019 and served as President

Vertical scene: toB

2020 ｜ CopyAI

Location: Memphis

What it does: Provides enterprise clients with an AI-driven copywriting tool that enables users to generate marketing copy in seconds

Number of users: more than 5 million professionals and teams

team:

CEO - Paul Yacoubian / 1986

- Graduated from Rhodes College in 2008, majoring in Economics, Business Administration and Accounting

- Finance - Worked in a tax company, Hedge Fund, CFO of a research institution, and the last job before starting a business was  ESO Fund  GP

Co-Founder - Chris Lu / 1993

- Graduated from WashU in 2015

- Finance/Finance- joined  ESO Fund after graduation , and was Partner before leaving

Financing Records:

- 2020 - Pre-Seed - Bill Yu, Unpopular

- 2021 - Seed - Sequoia, Craft, Atelier

- 2021 - A - Sequoia, Tiger, Craft, Wing, Elad Gil

2021 ｜ Writesonic

Location: SF

Brief: Create SEO-Optimized and Plagiarism-Free Content for Blogs, Ads, Emails, and Websites 10X Faster

Users: Over 1 million marketing teams, agencies and freelancers

team:

CEO - Samanyou Garg / 1997

- 2021 BA from The University of Manchester, CS

- Started working as a developer in a company affiliated with Indian Railways in high school

- Founded the first company at the age of 19, doing outsourcing, and made the first text generation tool TLDR This in 2019

- Worked as a development engineer at Deloitte for two years after graduation

Financing Records:

- 2021 - Pre-Seed - YC

- 2021 - Seed - HOF, Rebel, Amino, Broom, BluePointe, Atlas Pacific, Soma

2021｜Jasper

Location: Austin

Brief: A generative AI commerce platform that helps teams create content tailored for brands 10x faster

Number of users: more than 100,000 teams

team:

CEO - Dave Rogenmoser / 1989

- Graduated from Kansas StateU, BBA in 2011

- Founded a recruitment company in 2014, and co-founded a marketing company with the CTO at the same time, and founded the CRM company Proof with the CTO in 2017

CTO - John Philip Morgan

- Started a business with the CEO in 2014

Financing Records:

- 2021 - Venture - Bossanova, Quarry

- 2021 - Seed - $6m - Foundation, Four Cities, AAF

-  2022  - A - $125m - Bessemer, Insignt Partners, Foundation, Coatue, IVP, Founders Circle, HubSpot

Vertical scene: toC

2019｜Mem Labs

Location: SF

Introduction: A personal workspace to capture, share and leverage knowledge

Users: Over 1 million marketing teams, agencies and freelancers

team:

CEO - Kevin Moody / 1995

- Graduated from Stanford, CS in 2017

- Founded a service learning platform for high school students in 2013, was selected as Lightspeed Summer Fellow together with DX in 2015  , and founded Rhythmiq

- Worked as a map product manager at Google after graduation

CTO - Dennis Xu / 1995

- Graduated from Stanford, CS - AI in 2017

- In 2015, he was selected as  Lightspeed Summer Fellow with KM and founded Rhythmiq

- Worked as a product manager at Yelp after graduation and built a local service platform Nearby Jobs

Financing Records:

- 2019 - Pre-Seed - Floodgate, Unusual

- 2021 - Seed - $5.6m - a16z, Floodgate, Unusual, Shrug, Dreamers, The Todd & Rahul Angel Fund, Julia Lipton, a16z Cultural Leadership Fund, Individuals - Todd Goldberg, Rahul Vohra

- 2022 - A1 - Material V, Firestreak

- 2022 - A2 - $23.5m - OpenAI

Picture｜Image

Demo｜Slides

2015｜Beautiful AI

Location: SF

Brief: AI-powered presentation maker software

Users: Over 1 million users and 32,000 companies

team:

CTO - Mitch Grasso / 1978

- Graduated from JHU, BA in 1990

- Design- served as design and art director in several companies before starting a business

- Founded the design company Adspace in 1998, the product line was acquired in 2005, founded the cloud collaboration pre software company Sliderocket in 2007, and was acquired by VMware in 2011

Financing Records:

- 2018 - A - $5m - First Round, Shasta

- 2018 - B - $11m - First Round, Shasta, Trinity

2020｜Tome

Location: SF

What it is: A productivity tool for storytelling that helps users transform ideas into visually appealing narratives - currently singles out the education industry

Number of users: The total number of former users is temporarily unknown, and it will take 4 months from 0-1 million

team:

CEO - Keith Peiris / 1988

- BA Waterloo, Nanoengineering, 2011

- Product Manager - worked as a product manager at Facebook , Instagram, Citizen (0-1) before starting a  business

- Greylock EIR 2020

CPO - Henri Liriani / 1993

- 2013 Boston College dropout, Arabic Culture and Sociology

- Design- Worked as a designer at Perfect (document plug-in, note-taking software) at the age of 14 before starting a business

- Dropped out of school in 2013 to found music sharing software Craaave

 - Joined Facebook in 2014 and was Head of Product - Messenger HI before leaving

Financing Records:

- 2021 - Seed - $6.1m - Greylock

- 2021 - Venture - 500 Global

- 2021 - A - $26m - Coatue, Greylock, Audacious

- 2023 - B - $43m - Lightspeed, Wing, Greylock, Coatue, 8VC, Audacious, personal David Luan, Emad Mostaque, etc.

2020｜Gamma

Location: SF

Introduction: Make presentations like writing documents, available for live or asynchronous discussions

team:

Co-Founder - Grant Lee / 198X

- Graduated from Stanford

- Consulting, Finance- He worked in PwC, RBC, Shiseido in consulting, investment banking, operations and financial strategy, served as Interim CFO in  Optimizely  , and joined the start-up company ClearBrain as COO in 2018

Co-Founder - Jon Noronha / 1989

- Graduated from Harvard, CS in 2011

- Lead Author of PlateMate - a system for getting high-quality data from crowd workers on Mechanical Turk and used it to build an app that lets you take a photo of your lunch and see you how many calories you ate.

- Before starting a business, he worked as PM in MSFT Image Search department and Optimizely  , and was VP Product before leaving

Co-Founder - James Fox / 1985

- Graduated from California Polytechnic State University, CE in 2008

- Consulting, Engineering - Before starting a business, he worked as a consultant at KPMG and as a software engineer at Optimizely

- Started a part-time business in 2012, doing social event planning website and app

Financing Records:

- 2021 - Seed - $7m - Accel, Script, Hustle, South Park, Afore, Eric Yuan, Jeff Weiner

2021｜Journey

Location: Seattle

Introduction: Created for B2B Sales

team:

CEO - Peter Clark / 1985

- Graduated in 2009, CS & Product Design

- Founded News App Broadersheet in 2008

- Twice selected to YC in 2011, a voicemail company, and a CRM company, the latter sold to  AdRoll in 2013

- Founded the automatic question answering app Misc in 2017

- - Joined JUUL Labs  as product director in 2018 

CTO - Anil Sevim / 1988

- Graduated in 2011, CE

- Graduated as a Udemy Founding Engineer

 - Joined AdRoll  in 2014 as technical director of growth team

- - Joined JUUL Labs  as Engineering Director in 2018 

CBO - Brendan Weitz / 1984

- Graduated from UMich in 2006

- Worked in consumer, media and marketing companies

- - Joined AdRoll  in 2012  as senior BD director before leaving, then joined Quora as GM

Financing Records:

- 2021 - Pre-Seed - YC

- 2022 - Pre-Seed - $4m - Susa Ventures

Audio｜Audio

2017｜Assembly AI

Location: SF

Brief: An API platform for transcribing and understanding audio data

Number of users: more than 6000 companies

team:

CEO - Dylan Fox / 1989

- Graduated from GWU in 2011

- Founded the donation platform YouGive1 after graduation

- Joined Cisco in 2015 as Sr SE, ML

Financing Records:

- 2017 - Seed - YC

- 2020 - Venture - $5M - Daniel Gross, John Collison, Nat Friedman

- 2022 - A - $28m - Accel, YC, TechNexus, Individual

- 2022 - B - $30m - Insight, Accel, YC, TechNexus

2018｜Resemble AI

Location: Canada

What it is: Create custom voices using a proprietary deep learning model to generate realistic synthetic speech

User Volume: More than 200,000 AI sounds and more than 2 million minutes of audio are generated every month

team:

CEO - Zohaib Ahmed / 1992

- Graduated from U of T in 2014

- After that, worked as a software engineer at Blackberry, Hipmunk, and Magic Leap, and worked as a Magic Leap Lead SE before starting a business

Co-Founder - Saqib Muhammad

- Investment/VC experience

Financing Records:

- 2019 - Pre Seed - Canada Partners, Craft, FirstMinute, Betaworks, AET

- 2020 - Seed - $2m - Craft, Betaworks, Firstminute, AET

- 2021 - Seed - $2m - Spacecadet

2018｜Sonantic

Location: UK

What it is: Delivering the world's most expressive and lifelike artificial sound

team:

CEO - Zeena Qureshi / 1992

- Graduated from UCL in 2013, History of Art

- Established Ananas Foundation in 2015 (yes, that's what Stability AI founder did, Emad is Zeena's brother-in-law)

Financing Records:

- Acquired by Spotify in 2021

2021｜Coqui

Location: Berlin

What it is: A startup making open voice technology available to everyone

team:

 CEO - Kelly Davis / 1970

- 1992 B.A. from MIT, 1997 Ph.D. from Rugters

- Worked as SE or ML in several companies

- Founded natural language interaction company forty.to in 2012

- Joined Mozilla in 2015 to build language interaction functions for Firefox

The other 3 Co-Founders of the team are all from Mozilla, born in 1980, 1989 and 1997 respectively

Music｜Music

2016｜Aiva

Location: Luxemberg

Introduction: Using AI to Create Personalized Soundtracks

team:

CEO - Pierre Barreau / 1995

- Graduated from UCL, CS in 2016

- Co-founded a live broadcast platform during college

CTO and COO are CEO's college classmates

Financing Records:

- 2017 - Seed - 650k euros - kima

- 2020 - Seed - 1.5 million euros - NetEase

2020｜Soundful

Location: San Diego

What it is: AI-powered music creation platform that empowers creators and artists to analyze, compose and monetize music

team:

CEO - Diaa El All / 1980+

- 2015 BA from Penn State, Economics

- Music, Marketing - Before starting a business, he worked as an Admin Officer at US Trust, a music producer for several companies, and a marketing staff for several companies

- In 2016, co-founded the data-driven digital marketing platform smartboost, and in 2018, co-founded the car club Fast Lane Drive

Financing Records:

- 2021 - Seed - $3.8m

Video｜Video

2015｜Lumen5

Location: Canada

What it is: AI-powered video creation platform that turns articles and blog posts into social videos with a simple interface

Number of users: more than 1 million companies

team:

CEO - Michael Cheng / 1980

- Graduated from SFU in 2011 with a bachelor's degree in Interactive Arts and Technology

-  At the age of 10, he began to try to make various Internet tools

- Founded WittyCookie after graduating from university, and founded connection management platform Sniply in 2014

CTO - Nigel Gutzmann / 1990

- 2012 B.A. Calgary, CS & EE

- Co-founded 3 companies after graduation, collaboration, HR, content platform, co-founded Sniply with CEO in 2014

Product - Christopher Bowal / 1982

- 2014 B.A. Calgary, CS & EE

- Deeper relationship with CTO, and create HR platform together

Financing Records:

- 2018 - Pre-Seed - NEXT Canada

- 2019 - Grant - $105k - New Ventures BC, Creative Destruction Lab

2017｜Synthesia

Location: London

What it is: AI-generated video Avatar platform that can create professional videos with text in 120 different languages

Number of users: more than 40,000 companies

team:

CEO - Victor Riparbelli / 1994

- Graduated from Copenhagen Polytechnic in 2015, CS

- Growth in LEGO incubator Kirkbi after graduation

- Founded Immersive Futures in 2016, software service

COO & CFO - Steffen Tjerrild / 1992

- Graduated from Copenhagen Business School in 2015

- Investment- After graduation, he worked as an investment manager in Kukula, an investment company in Zambia

 The two founders both used Crypto as a side project in 2017

 There are two professors as co-founders, respectively working in UCL and Munich University of Technology

Financing Records:

- 2017 - Pre-Seed - $1m - Mark Cuban

- 2019 - Seed - $3.1m - Seedcamp, Tiny, MMC, Personal

- 2021 - A - $12.5m - FirstMark, MMC

- 2021 - B - $50m -KP, GV, MMC, LDV, FirstMark, s16vc, Seedcamp

2017｜Descriptor

Location: SF

Introduction: Collaborative audio and video editor, transcribe audio into text files for editing

team:

CEO - Andrew Mason / 1981

- In 2003, graduated from Northwestern University, majoring in music

- Founded The Point, Groupon, Detour

Financing Records:

- 2017 - $5m - Seed by a16z

- 2019 - $15m - A by a16z, Redpoint

- 2021 - $30m - B by Spark, Redpoint, Individuals - including Devdatta Akhawe, Alex Blumberg, Jack Conte, Justine Ezarik, Todd Goldberg, Jean-Denis Greze, John Lilly, Tobi Lutke, Bharat Mediratta, Shishir Mehrotra, Casey Neistat, Brian Pokorny, Raghavendra Prabhu, Lenny Rachitsky, Naval Ravikant, Jay Simons, Jake Shapiro, Rahul Vohra, and Ev Williams

- 2022 - $50m - C by OpenAI, a16z, Spark, Redpoint, Personal - Daniel Gross

2018｜Runway

Location: NY

What it is: Over 30 AI tools for real-time video editing, collaboration, and more in the browser

team:

 CEO - Cristóbal Valenzuela Barrera / 1990

- 2012 BA & MA in UAI (Chile), Economics, BA & Design

- Teaching - After graduation, he taught design in the school. In 2016, he went to New York University as a researcher and participated in the  MPS Program at the same time.

CTO - Anastasis Germanidis / 1991

- 2013 B.A. Wesleyan, CS

- Worked as a back-end engineer in several companies after graduation

- - Joined New York University MPS Program in 2016 

CDO - Alejandro Matamala / 1986

- 2009 Bachelor's Degree in Advertising Art, U del Pacifico (Chile)

- Founded a design studio during college and founded Deenty in 2013, an online dentist appointment software

- - Joined New York University MPS Program in 2016 

Financing Records:

- 2018 - Seed - $2m - Lux

- 2020 - A - $8.5m - Amplify, Lux, Bossanova, Compound

- 2021 - A - Bienville

- 2021 - B - $35m - Coatue

- 2022 - C - $50m - Felicis, Lux, Amplify, Compound, Coatue, Individual

2019｜Rephrase.ai

Location: SF

Brief: Convert plain text to professional-quality video in minutes for brands

Number of users: more than 50 top brands, mainly in e-commerce, real estate, and financial services

team:

CEO - Ashray Malhotra / 1993

- Graduated from IIT, CS & EE in 2016

- Founded the wireless sound transmission company SoundRex in SF after graduation

CTO - Nisheeth Lahoti / 1993

- Graduated from IIT, CS & EE in 2015 (undergraduate classmate with CEO)

- Worked as a software engineer at Google London for a year after graduation

- Later co-founded SoundRX with the CEO in SF

Financing Records:

- 2019 - Pre-Seed - $100k - Techstars

- 2020 - Seed - $1.5m - Lightspeed India, AV8

- 2022 - A - $10.6m - Red, 8VC, Silver Lake

2020｜WOMBO

Note: Both short video and picture (Dream) can be done

Location: Canada

Introduction: An AI-driven lip-syncing short video app that generates deepfake videos based on images, and lip-syncs the characters in the picture with the selected song

Number of users: over 1.2 million downloads

team:

CEO - Ben-Zion Benkhin / 1997

- 2015 - 2020 UToronto Dropout, Mathematics and Philosophy

- Founded Zion Digital in 2014

AI - Parshant Loungani / 2000

- Waterloo, not yet graduated

6 Co-Founders, all classmates

Financing Records:

- 2021 - Pre-Seed - Marc Baghadjian

- 2021 - Seed - $6m - Global Founders, LaunchHouse, Bickley, Sound, MPGI, Sofreh, Flucas, Personal

- 2022 - Seed - FJ Labs

Code｜Code

2016｜Replied

Location: SF

Introduction: Browser-based cross-platform collaborative coding integrated development environment =  Figma + Google docs + Roblox for coding

team:

CEO - Amjad Masad / 1988

- Graduated from PSUT, Amman, Jordan, CS in 2010

-Technology- After graduation, I worked as a front-end in Jordan's research institute and Yahoo

- In 2011, he went to New York to become the founding engineer of Codecademy, and joined Facebook as a software engineer in 2013

CTO - Faris Masad

- Brother CEO

Design - Haya Odeh / 1985

- Graduated from the University of Oman in 2007 with a bachelor's degree in Design

- After graduation, worked as Graphic/Web Designer in several companies, CEO wife

Funding and Development Record:

-  In October 2016, received $600k seed round investment from Bloomberg Beta , was rejected by YC for the first time -> started to make profits by selling code evaluation infrastructure as API, but the free product (high maintenance cost) grew faster Many; in order to maintain operations, began to do developer tools and programming education ; free REPL products caught the attention of Paul Graham through Hacker News, but had been rejected by YC three times before

-  2018 Winter Entrepreneurship Camp, settled in YC , $120k, 7% , 750,000 registered users

-  Oct 2018, a16z, lead $4.5m seed round , ~1.5M registered users -> 250K apps and websites hosted in 7 months, continuous development of new features, focus on finding new ones to get young people to start coding method

-  In December 2020, A. Capital, led the A round of $20m , the announcement was delayed due to the epidemic, in December 2020, 5 million+ registered users

- In February 2021, announced the A round of financing, 6 million + registered users, a year-on-year increase of 122%

-  Nov 2021 Coatue leads $80m Series B  -> 8M+ registered users; 13M+ websites & apps created & hosted on Replit; 10B+ monthly app visits

[图片]

2018｜Debuild

Location: SF

Brief: Generate full-stack web applications using LLMs, allowing users to build web applications by describing what they should do in plain English

team:

CEO - Sharif Shameem / 1995+

- BS in Maryland, CS

- In 2018, the cloud game company Vectordash was established at the same time

- In October 2022, a new company Lexica was established, an AI art tool

Financing Records:

- 2020 - Seed - Offline

- 2020 - Pre Seed - FundersClub, Founders, Inc

2022｜Magic

Location: SF

Brief: Building aligned, more complete AI to accelerate human progress on the world's most important problems - currently a no-code product

team:

CEO - Eric Steinberger / 2000

- 2020 BA from University of Cambridge, CS

- Worked as a reinforcement learning researcher at Facebook AI during undergraduate studies - led the development of "DREAM", an algorithm that's 100x more data-efficient and trains faster than the previous state-of-the-art in model-free multi-agent Deep RL

- Established climate education institution ClimateScience in 2019

CTO - Sebastian De Ro

Financing Records:

- 2022 - Seed - $5.1m - Nat Fridman

- 2023 - A - $23m - CapitalG, Nat Friedman, Elad Gil, Amplify Partners, 10x Founders, + a lot of individuals

[图片]

Chatbot｜Chatbot

2017｜Cresta

Location: SF

Introduction: Integrated modern customer service center

team:

CEO - S. Zayd Enam / 1990+

- Community college transfer to UCB, Stanford AI PhD dropout

- Founded an online doctor appointment platform in Pakistan in 2008 and closed it in 10 years

CTO - Tim Shi / 1993

- Graduated from Tsinghua University in 2015, ranked first in CS, Stanford AI PhD dropout in 2017

- Part-time work in DJI and OpenAI during Ph.D.

- Founded Stanford AI+ Club in 2016

Financing Records:

- 2020 - Seed - $6m - a16z

- 2020 - A - $15m - Greylock, a16z, personal

- 2021 - B - $50m - Sequoia, a16z, Greylock, Allen&Company, Porsche

- 2022 - C - $80m - Tiger, Sequoia, Zoom, a16z, Porsche, JP Morgan, Five9, Genesys, etc

2019｜Cohere

Location: Canada

Brief: CRM platform for developers and enterprises, powered by the latest LLM

team:

CEO - Aidan Gomez / 1995

- In 2018, he graduated from the University of Toronto, CS, and in the same year, Oxford Ph.D. dropout

- Worked with Geoffery Hinton in 2018- on distillation and initialization, 2019- Worked with Jakob Uszkoreit, Jeff Dean, and the Berlin Google Brain team on Pathways and Transformers for visual understanding

CTO - Ivan Zhang / 1996

- Joined Ranomics from Toronto undergraduate dropout in 2016

- After that, worked as an engineer/researcher in Pressly, Cortex, FOR.ai

Financing Records:

- 2021 - A - $40m - Index, Section 32, Pieter Abbeel, Li Feifei and others

- 2022 - B - CA$159m - Tiger, Index, Section 32, Radical Ventures, Geoff Hinton, Pieter Abbeel, Li Feifei and others

2022｜Character.AI

Location: SF

Brief: Create and talk to advanced AI (language tutors, text adventure games, celebrities, talking animals, etc.)

team:

CEO - Noam Shazeer / 1976

- Graduated from Duke University in 1998

- 2000-2021 as a software engineer at Google, when he left as principal

President - Daniel De Freitas / 1989

- Graduated from the University of Sao Paulo in 2011, CE

- Joined Microsoft Bing as a software engineer in 2012

- Joined Google as a research engineer in 2016

Financing Records:

- 2021 - A - $40m - Index, Section 32, Pieter Abbeel, Li Feifei and others

- 2022 - B - CA$159m - Tiger, Index, Section 32, Radical Ventures, Geoff Hinton, Pieter Abbeel, Li Feifei and others

CEO introduces himself:

I have invented much of the current revolution in large language models. Some of my inventions include:

Transformer (2017) (personally designed the multi-head attention, the residual architecture, and coded up the first better-than-SOTA working implementation)

Sparsely -gated Mixture of Experts (2016) 

Mesh-Tensorflow (2018) - first practical system for training giant Transformers on supercomputers.

T5 (2019)

Major contributor to Google's LaMDA dialog system, a project led by Daniel De Freitas, my now co-founder at Character AI.

Search｜Search

Comprehensive scene

2019｜Neeva

Location: SF

What it is: An ad-free private search engine that helps its users find exactly what they care about

team:

Co - Founder - Sridhar Ramaswamy / 1967

- Ph.D. from Brown in 1994, BA from IIT

- Google SVP- Ads & Commerce before joining Greylock

Co-Founder - Vivek Raghunathan / 1979

- In 2007, he graduated from UIUC with a Ph.D. and graduated from IIT with a bachelor's degree

- Google VP before starting a business - lead all engineering for YouTube monetization

Financing Records:

- 2020 - A - $37.5m - Greylock, Sequoia, SV Angel, Sridhar Ramaswamy

- 2021 - B - $40m - Greylock, Sequoia, Inovia, Neythri Future

2022｜Perplexity

Location: SF

What it is: an answer engine designed to provide accurate answers to questions using LLM

team:

CEO - Aravind Srinivas / 1995

- 2021 Ph.D graduate from UCB, Bachelor degree from IIT

- Internship at OpenAI, Deepmind, Google

- OpenAI Research Scientist before starting a business

Financing Records:

- Backed by Elad Gil, Nat Friedman, Jeff Dean, Yann LeCun, and several others

Vertical Scenario: Inside the Enterprise

2019｜Glean

Location: SF

What it is: a work assistant that allows and helps employees find any data in their workplace

team:

CEO - Arvind Jain / 1974

- Graduated from IIT in 1996 and graduated from UWash in 1997

- Worked as a software engineer at Microsoft and Google before starting a business

- Co-founded Rubrik in 2014

Product Engineering - Tony Gentilcore / 1982

- Graduated from Saint Louis U in 2004

- Worked as a software engineer at Google for ten years

- Established a social platform as a founding member in 2016, and started to do business consulting in 2018

Search - Piyush Prahladka / 1983

- Graduated from IIT in 2005

- After that, worked as Engineering Lead at Google and Uber

Infra - TR Vishwanath / 1975

- Graduated from IIT in 1997 and graduated from UT Austin in 1999

- Worked in Oracle and Microsoft after graduation, and served as Principal SE at Facebook before starting a business

Financing Records:

- 2019 - A - $15.3m - KP, Lightspeed, Slack

- 2021 - B - $39.3m - General Catalyst, Lightspeed, KP, Slack

- 2023 - C - $100m - Sequoia, General Catalyst, KP, Slack

Data｜Data

2018｜Datagen

Location: Tel Aviv

What it is: Provides a synthetic image dataset, accessible through the platform or API. Design and generate human-centric datasets with granular control - generate synthetic data for virtual reality, augmented reality, computer vision and artificial intelligence (i.e. self-driving cars, robotics and IoT security)

team:

CEO - Ofir Chakon / 1991

- Graduated from Israel IIT in 2015

- Co-founded an anti-fraud SaaS company after graduation

- Joined Israel ITC Fellows in 2017

CTO - Gil Elbaz / 1994

- Graduated from IIT Israel in 2017

- Doing 3D point cloud algorithm analysis in OMEK Magnet during the master's degree

Financing Records:

- 2019 - Seed - $3.5m - TLV, Spider, Personal

- 2021 - A - $18.5m - Viola, Spider, TLV, Matias, Operator Partners, Individual

- 2022 - B - $50m - Scale, TLV, Viola, Spider

2019｜Bifrost

Location: Singapore

What it is: A synthetic data tool that helps AI teams build powerful computer vision models without collecting data or labeling

Currently more concerned about 3D Models - Build better AI models with simulation & synthetic data - urban construction, environmental engineering

team:

CEO - Charles Wong / 1997

- 2019 undergraduate graduate from SUTD

- Internship in several EV companies during college and lead the school EV club

CTO - Aravind Kandiah / 1997

- CEO college classmate

Financing Records:

- 2021 - Seed - $1.6m - Sequoia India, Techstars, Wavemaker, CAP Vista, Lux, Hustle, Champion Hill

2022｜Pilot

Location: SF

Introduction: Automatically turn every sales call into detailed notes and structured data, directly synced to CRM

team:

CEO - Maxwell Lu / 1993

- Graduated from UIUC in 2014

- Make products in Salesforce after graduation

- Before starting a business, he was the founding engineer of Clipboard Health, Welcome (A webinar and content platform) Head of Revenue Operations - founding team member

Financing Records:

-YC

AI tools

Fun｜For Fun

Scribble Diffusion by ControlNet 

I believe that everyone who pays attention to the visual model has already been screened by ControlNet. The author is Zhang Lumin, a first-year Ph.D.