Maginative

🎉 Exciting news! We’re thrilled to welcome Dr. Jess Conser to the Maginative team! She brings a wealth of experience, a sharp strategic mind, and a deep passion for her work at the intersection of people, AI, and business. Her expertise will be invaluable as we help companies understand and adopt AI with confidence.

🎉 2024 was absolutely incredible! We ended December with over 100K monthly readers! Thank you to everyone who joined our community, liked/shared our content and supported our work. 🙏🏾 Happy New Year everyone! 🎉 www.maginative.com

Should companies own their AI? Inflection AI believes they should! They are partnering with Intel Corporation, Dell Technologies and UiPath to offer AI solutions with custom models trained on their data and running on-prem or in private clouds. I had a chance to sit down with Inflection AI's COO Ted Shelton to talk about the company's new direction, the new Inflection 3 models and their enterprise AI offerings. We also discuss some of the top challenges enterprise are facing with AI adoption. Check out the full episode here - https://lnkd.in/gExdej2m

You.com, an AI-powered productivity platform, has secured $50 million in Series B funding. The round, led by Georgian with participation from tech giants NVIDIA and Salesforce Ventures, brings You.com's total funding to $95 million. Read the article here - https://lnkd.in/gUBvE4Jt

Pittsburgh startup Skild AI.ai just secured $300 million in Series A funding, pushing its valuation to $1.5 billion. The company, founded in 2023 by ex-Carnegie Mellon professors Abhinav Gupta and Deepak Pathak, is developing what it calls a "general purpose brain" for robots. Investors include Lightspeed, Coatue, SoftBank Group, Jeff Bezos, Felicis, Sequoia Capital, and others. Read the full article - https://lnkd.in/eKp7Ciz5

Elon Musk's AI company xAI has ended talks with Oracle to expand their server rental agreement, opting instead to build its own cutting-edge AI data center. The talks between the companies reportedly valued at $10 Billion, would have seen xAI renting specialized NVIDIA AI chips from Oracle over multiple years. Read the article https://lnkd.in/eQ_FJG_p

Captions, the popular AI-powered video creation platform, has just closed a $60 million Series C funding round, pushing the company's total raised capital to $100 million and its valuation to a hefty $500 million. This round was led by Index Ventures, and also saw participation from returning investors Kleiner Perkins, Andreessen Horowitz, and Sequoia Capital, alongside new investors Adobe Ventures, HubSpot Ventures, and actor Jared Leto. Read the full article - https://lnkd.in/eaqsYFMm

Hebbia, a New York-based AI startup, just secured $130 million in Series B funding to transform how knowledge workers work. Andreessen Horowitz led the round, with Index Ventures, GV (Google Ventures), and Peter Thiel joining in, valuing the company at roughly $700 million. https://lnkd.in/eFAftq2X

Sound is a critical part of making a good video. This is why, despite the realism of the output from tools like Google's Veo, OpenAI's Sora, and Runway's Gen-3 Alpha, the videos often feel lifeless. Google Deepmind's latest AI model hopes to fill this void by generating synchronized soundtracks for your video. It's pretty wild. https://lnkd.in/es7YP9fY

Mistral AI AI, the Paris-based startup founded by alumni from Meta and Google’s DeepMind, has raised $640 million in a Series B funding round led by General Catalyst. https://lnkd.in/e5maGC_P