Today in AI | AI Startup Newsletter

💭 Meet Bret Taylor : The OpenAI Chair that just raised $175M at a $4.5B valuation for his conversational AI startup: Sierra 🤖 Sierra was founded in May 2023 by Bret Taylor and Clay Bavor with the mission to empower consumer brands to build customer facing AI agents. These agents will help you on every aspect of customer service from finding your order to order returns and exchanges. Essentially, Sierra is helping companies build branded AI agents for every single part of the customer experience. 🤔 Why is this super exciting? Bret thinks we’re in an era of conversational software. With GPT-4, we’ve crossed a quality threshold of effectiveness with conversational AI where now you’re able to have a super nuanced conversation with AI and it will actually work. In 1995, the way you existed digitally as a business was to have a website/app. In 2025, the way you exist digitally is to have an AI agent. 💸 Sierra has now crossed over $20M in annual revenue despite being founded less than 2 years ago. 💲 Some of their customers now include Sonos, SiriusXM, WeightWatchers and AG1, who have all experienced higher customer engagement & higher resolution rates with Sierra. 💰️ On October 28th 2024, Sierra raised a $175M venture round at a $4.5B valuation led by GreenOaks with participation from ICONIQ Capital and Thrive Capital. 🤯 Bret really thinks that this is a new category of digital experience and companies will want to be present in this world of conversational AI. Check out the full story here 👉 https://lnkd.in/giKwZZKt

💭 Meet Virgílio (“V”) Bento : The Portuguese-born founder freeing 2 billion people from pain with his $3B AI startup: Sword Health 🩻 Sword Health uses AI to power virtual physical therapy to help people recover from pain and essentially avoid surgery. 🐦🔥 They’re able to do this through their AI care model: Phoenix, which solves patients’ problems, giving them instructions and feedback in a highly engaging way. 🧑⚕️ It combines what human clinicians and AI each do best, so that everyone, everywhere can get the clinical-grade, life-changing care they deserve. 🏆 Right now, Sword Health is the single largest provider of care through AI, holding a majority of industry patents and a 70% win rate in competitive evaluations. 🚀 In 2023, Sword Health did around $200M in ARR with 2.7x growth year over year. They also just turned profitable in Q3 2024, with $500K in positive cashflow. 💰 In June 2024, Sword Health raised a $130M Series E at a $3B valuation led by Khosla Ventures with participation from General Catalyst, BOND, Founders Fund, Sapphire Ventures and others. This brings their total raised to over $450M. ☄️ Virgilio says that Sword is on a mission to free 2 Billion people from pain by pioneering the field of AI care and that they’re only 5% of the way there. Check out the full story here 👉https://lnkd.in/dw87KJVD

💭 Meet Qasar Younis: The Pakistani-born founder that raised a $250M Series E at a $6B valuation for his AI-powered autonomous driving startup: Applied Intuition 🤖 Applied Intuition was founded in 2017 by Qasar Younis and Peter Ludwig with the mission to enable the emergence of a safe and intelligent machine ecosystem. 🚘 The startup provides software tools for developing autonomous driving and Advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) to some of the biggest automakers in the world. 📈 They’ve even recently launched an off-road autonomy solution to enable safe navigation of bad terrain, a Gen-AI tool that creates simulation scenarios up to 40x faster. 🏎️ So far, the startup has managed to work with 18 of the top 20 automakers including GM, Toyota, and Volkswagen for development purposes. 💸 Applied Intuition is now profitable (super rare for AI companies nowadays), and has achieved triple-digit percentage growth year over year. 💰 In March 2024, Applied Intuition raised $250M at a $6B valuation led by Lux Capital, Elad Gil and Porsche Investments Management with participation from Reid Hoffman, Ray Dalio, and General Catalyst among many others. 💴 In July 2024, they raised a further $300M, bringing their total raised to over $900M. 🚀 Peter Ludwig says at this point it’s “dangerous for an automaker not to partner with us in some ways because of the sheer complexity and impact of some of the tech we’re working on”... Check out the full story here 👉https://lnkd.in/dXiKKdqA

💭Meet Amjad Masad: The Jordanian Entrepreneur bringing software development to 1 billion people with his $1B startup: Replit 🙃 Replit was created to make coding super easy and fun for everyone! 🖥️ Instead of having to set up a bunch of tools on your computer, you can just go to Replit, pick your favorite coding language, and start building things right in your web browser. 🛠️ Replit lets you build websites, apps, and other cool projects without needing to worry about installing or setting up anything. You can also share your code with friends and work on the same code together at the same time. 👨💻More recently, Replit even came out with their own AI copilot - Replit AI, which helps you build anything you want even if you don’t know how to write a single line of code! 📈Today, Replit has over 30M users from 200+ countries. 235M+ projects have been created using Replit, creating 25B+ external monthly visits to apps and sites hosted on Replit. 💰In 2023, Replit raised a $107.4M Series D at a $1.16B post-money valuation led by a16z’s growth fund with participation from Khosla Ventures, Coatue, SV Angel, Y Combinator, Bloomberg Beta, Naval Ravikant, Hamilton Helmer, ARK Venture Fund and Craft Ventures. Check out the full story here 👉https://lnkd.in/d6Smy3n7

💭 Meet Jaspar Carmichael-Jack : The 22 year-old founder that’s making $1.5M/year with his AI startup: Artisan 🦾 Artisan creates AI employees, called Artisans, then consolidates software tools together to create this unified software ecosystem where Artisans are managing and doing your work for you. 📬 They’ve already started with their first Artisan “Ava”, who automates the whole outbound sales workflow including everything from finding leads, to writing hyper-personalized emails and sending LinkedIn messages. 💸 Artisan has scaled from $0 to $1.5M in ARR in just 8 months and already has over 120 companies using their platform. 🧑 The startup has a combined house office in SF, where 4 people currently live, and other employees fly in to stay. In total they have 25 employees right now with the majority being remote. 💰 On September 30th 2024, Artisan AI raised an $11.5M seed led by Oliver Jung, with participation from Y Combinator, HubSpot Ventures, Day One Ventures and others, bringing their total raised to $21.1M. 📈 According to Jaspar, he wants to be building Artisan for the next 20 years and he has his eyes on an IPO. Check out the full story here 👉 https://lnkd.in/dkBsZfQt Jaspar Carmichael-Jack Tina Sang

💭 Meet Gavin and Chris: The 2 Harvard dropouts that raised $120M to compete with Nvidia with their AI startup: Etched 🤓 Etched transforms AI chips, only using a single type of architecture: Transformers 🤖, the same type of architecture that powers a lot of today’s biggest models including OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Sora. 📈 Etched AI’s flagship chip - Sohu, is promised to deliver on having a 20x higher throughput than Nvidia’s H100 Chips, and even a much better latency - cutting time to the first token by a factor of 2. 🚀 If Transformers keep being the dominant way that AI models work, their chip will be the most performant on the market by an order of magnitude. 🦾 The startup has already partnered with TSMC - the world’s largest semiconductor foundry and has been working on their 4 nano-meter nodes (the same ones used in Nvidia’s Blackwell GPUs). 💸According to Gavin, Etched also has pre-orders for tens of millions of their chips making them real competition for Jensen Huang’s Nvidia. 🤔Do you think the Sohu chip will live up to the hype? Or will Nvidia’s H100s keep being the dominant chip in the industry? Check out the full story here 👉 https://lnkd.in/d6A7mziS Gavin Uberti Chris Zhu

💭 Meet Brendan, Adarsh & Surya: The 21 year-old dropouts who just raised a $30M Series A at a $250M valuation for their AI startup: Mercor 👀 Staffing and recruitment is a $750B industry where people, to this day, manually review resumes, manually conduct interviews and manually match people with the right jobs. 💡 This all changes with Mercor. 🤖 Mercor was founded in 2023 by Brendan Foody, Adarsh Hiremath, and Surya Midha, to build and train LLMs that automate all those processes. 🤓 Mercor reviews a resume the same way a human does, hopping on a zoom call and conducting an interview that’s far more in depth than a human is even able to do. 💸 The startup even facilitates all the payments to people hired, so businesses can have someone on their team with the click of a button. 🚀 So far, Mercor has had over 300K candidates who have gone through their application process and have achieved a 7 figure run-rate. 💰 On September 18th 2024, Mercor raised a $30M Series A at a $250M valuation led by Benchmark with participation from General Catalyst, Peter Thiel, Jack Doresey, Larry Summers, Chris Re and Adam D’Angelo. Check out the full story here 👉 https://lnkd.in/dtfnz8_C Brendan Foody Adarsh H. Surya Midha

💭 Meet Matt Rouif & Eliot Andres: the founders behind the $50M/year AI background removal tool: Photoroom 🌎 Photoroom was founded in 2019 in Paris with the mission to make studio-quality photos accessible to everyone in the world. 🤖 It’s essentially an AI-based photo editing app that uses deep learning to simplify technical tasks (like removing a background) so you can focus on the creative parts. 👯♀️ Photoroom has already been used to promote the Barbie Movie, and even one of Taylor Swift’s new albums. 💸 The startup did $50M in ARR profitably last year, up 50x in 3 years, and they’re already on track to doubling that to $100M in ARR this year. 💰 In their latest funding round, Photoroom raised a $43M Series B at a $500M valuation, bringing their total raised to $64M. The round was led by Balderton Capitaland Algae Ventures with participation from Y Combinator, Meta, Yann LeCun, Zehan Wang (Co-founder of Magic Pony) and more. 🚀 To this day, Y Combinator has said that they’ve never seen a company grow this fast with such little capital, making it one of YC’s most capital-efficient startups. 👉 Check-out the full story here: https://lnkd.in/dqnszgcr

💭 Did you know that more than half the US population prefers talking on the phone with businesses instead of email and chat? 🤑 This is what Bland AI is betting on. ☎️ Bland AI is a hyper-realistic AI phone agent founded by Isaiah Granet and Sobhan Nejad in 2023, that can make millions of phone calls, 24/7, in any voice, and for any use case. 😖 The problem: Call centers are expensive and inefficient to run. Call centers jobs also have some of the highest turnover rates in the world. They’re grueling, don’t pay well and are highly repetitive. 💡 The Solution: Using Bland, companies can build AI phone agents that are hyper-educated, have strict guidelines and integrate into every part of their tech stack. 🛃 Companies build the agent, integrate it into their CRMs and databases, and expand the use case whenever they need to. 💸 On August 28th 2024, Bland came out of “Stealth” and raised a $16M Series AI led by Scale Venture Partners with participation from Y Combinator, Max Levchin the founder of Paypal, Piotr Dąbkowski the CTO of Eleven Labs, and others. This brings their total raised to $22M. 🚀 Bland is already being used by companies like Sears and Better.com to change the way enterprises interact with customers forever. Check-out the full story here 👉 www.todayin-ai.com/p/bland Isaiah N. Granet Sobhan - Nejad Bland AI

📉 Did you know that only 50% of the US population is financially literate, with Gen-Z having the lowest literacy levels at just 24%? 💡 Zeed AI is tackling this challenge head-on. Founded in 2022, Zeed empowers a new generation of wealth builders by delivering smarter, more engaging financial experiences. 🏦Banks and brokerage apps are struggling to engage and activate their customers. While they spend heavily on customer acquisition, many users download the apps only to churn later due to poor engagement and lack of personalized experiences. 📱 Zeed is solving this by equipping financial institutions with AI-powered, personalized tools that boost customer engagement and activation. They’re turning passive users into high-conviction investors, while also streamlining efforts for marketing and product teams, saving both time and resources. 🔄 This creates a powerful feedback loop: personalized financial education fuels smarter investment decisions, which in turn increases engagement and helps institutions retain customers while generating valuable insights into user behavior. Zeed Rohan R. Salman Hussain