Failup Ventures’ Post

🔐🤖 I am excited to share that ConfidentialMind has secured a €1.5M pre-seed round led by Failup Ventures with support from Innovestor, Founders' Edge, and top data industry angel investors. The round consists of a €1M equity investment and a €0.5M loan from the Finnish government. We believe that the real value of AI will be in edge and private data centers. This is where the most valuable corporate and sovereign data resides. The systems that enable AI in data centers are traditionally difficult to build and maintain. We make development and deployment of generative AI models and applications in enterprise and government data centers as easy – or in some cases even easier – than in the cloud. We are at the forefront of innovation, seamlessly blending cutting-edge open-source advancements in the LLM space, with our unparalleled software infrastructure and components. This powerful combination empowers enterprises and governments to integrate generative AI on their own terms, providing the flexibility to build once and deploy anywhere. This is just the beginning! Jesse Heikkilä, Oscar Andersin, Topias Soininen, Hannu Jungman, Henry Nilert, Pekka Ylitalo, Ali Omar, ilkka Hiidenheimo, Daniel Fried, Jonathan Scudder, Markus Oksanen, Jan Goetz, Juha Vartiainen, Sofokus Ventures, Eljas Linna, Stefano Chiavegati, Elena G., Mark Faris, Michel Faris, Sylwia Barthel de Weydenthal (she/her), Henrikki Makynen, Joel-Oskar Raisanen Markku Räsänen, Severi Tikkala, Henri Dahl, Raido Linde, Dan Zi, Lucas Björklund

🚀 It's time for this week's #AISocialImpactSpotlight! Munich-based startup trail recently secured €1.45 million in a pre-seed round, led by CapitalT with participation from NP-Hard Ventures, Mozilla Ventures, Common Magic, and several business angels. This funding will boost trail’s product development, team expansion, and market leadership in #AIgovernance across Europe. 🌍 In an era of rapid AI advancements and impending regulations, trust is paramount. trail’s AI governance copilot is designed to meet this need, providing a developer-friendly solution for scalable #trustworthyAI development. Their platform integrates and structures AI project data, facilitating compliance and collaboration across disciplines. 🔍 Trail automates governance workflows, technical documentation, and transparency, preparing companies for the EU AI Act and ISO 42001 certification. 📊 They even offer a free self-assessment tool to help businesses determine their AI use case obligations. The founding team, Anna Spitznagel, Nikolaus Pinger, and Sven Hölzel, formed trail based on their experiences at TU Munich and CDTM, aiming to merge trust and efficiency in AI governance. 🎓🤝 Read more about trail's latest success here: https://lnkd.in/gq89ubTn! #AIGovernance #TrustworthyAI #StartupNews #AISocialImpactSpotlight

I came across this exciting Finnish startup last year who were talking about secure deployment models for AI 🤩 and am happy to be supporting their onward journey. There are so many examples of the functionality gold rush pushing half-baked solutions out of the door too quickly, with security being an afterthought. Let’s try to do it right this time! ConfidentialMind can help you efficiently and securely deploy your AI from day one. Take a look and see how 👀

ElevenLabs 𝐑𝐚𝐢𝐬𝐞𝐬 $𝟖𝟎 𝐌𝐢𝐥𝐥𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐚𝐭 $𝟏+ 𝐁𝐢𝐥𝐥𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐕𝐚𝐥𝐮𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧    ElevenLabs is a voice AI startup with a mission to develop a technology that would bridge the gap between human voices and AI-generated speech. The platform can analyze and replicate the nuances, intonations, and cadences of a person's voice. This results in a lifelike and indistinguishable synthetic voice that can be customized for a variety of applications.   ElevenLabs has raised $80 million in Series B funding at a $1+ billion valuation. The round was led by prominent investors, including Andreessen Horowitz, former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, and entrepreneur Daniel Gross. Moreover, the new round saw participation from Sequoia Capital, Smash Capital, SV Angel, BroadLight Capital, and Credo Ventures. In total, ElevenLabs has raised $101 million till that moment.   ElevenLabs, Brooklyn, New York, United States, was founded in 2022 by Piotr Dabkowski and Mati Staniszewski. “Our ambition remains the same — to transform how we interact with content by breaking down language and communication barriers,” said CEO Mati Staniszewski. “We’re building cutting-edge technology to make content accessible across languages — and voices — to enable everyone to connect with information and stories that matter.”

🔒 🧠 We are excited to announce that ConfidentialMind, our Espoo, Finland-based startup, has secured a pre-seed round of €1.5 million and that our story was featured on ArcticStartup. This milestone will help us accelerate our mission to enable enterprises and the public sector to create and deploy AI applications using their most confidential data. We are grateful to our lead investor, Failup Ventures, and to all other participators, including Angel CoFund managed by Innovestor and Founders' Edge, as well as top industry angel investors from Europe, including ilkka Hiidenheimo (co-founder of Stonesoft), Jonathan Scudder (co-founder of ForgeRock), Daniel Fried (former GM & SVP EMEA and Worldwide Channel at Veeam), and Jan Goetz and Juha Vartiainen (co-founders of IQM Quantum Computers). We also extend our gratitude to Jesse Heikkilä, Oscar Andersin, Topias Soininen, Hannu Jungman, Henry Nilert, Pekka Ylitalo, Ali Omar, Markus Oksanen, Sofokus Ventures, Eljas Linna, Stefano Chiavegati, Elena G., Mark Faris, Michel Faris,  Sylwia Barthel de Weydenthal (she/her), Henrikki Makynen, Joel-Oskar Raisanen. Read more about our pre-seed round success in the following article: 

Max Welling and Alyn Chad Edwards started work on CuspAI two months ago, and have just secured $30m from a roll call of well-known VCs from Europe and the US. Hoxton led the seed round, with Lightspeed, Basis Set, Northzone, Giant Ventures, FJ labs, Zero Prime Ventures and Tiferes Ventures also participating — plus Google Deepmind operators Mehdi Ghissassi and Dorothy Chou. CuspAI is a search engine for materials. Users can input the properties they want materials to have, and Cusp will generate the chemical composition needed to achieve it. Cusp’s team says its tech can help produce new materials needed for climate technologies, particularly in carbon capture. More: https://lnkd.in/eraB7234

The Roosh Ventures team is expanding its portfolio with powerful new investments in promising startups from around the world. This time, the French startup Gladia has completed a USD $16 million Series A, and Roosh Ventures is excited to join the round🤟 Gladia was founded in 2022 by Jean-Louis Quéguiner and Jonathan SOTO with a mission to help companies leverage cutting-edge AI and retrieve actionable insights from audio data. Based in Paris, Gladia has grown to serve over 70,000 users and 600 enterprise customers🔥 Given that most speech recognition models today are predominantly trained on English audio data, Gladia prioritized building the first real-time product that is truly multilingual. Their fine-tuned engine delivers advanced real-time transcription in over 100 languages, with enhanced support for accents and the unique ability to adapt to different languages on the fly. "While #AI is generating a lot of noise, our focus remains on the fundamentals — team quality, vision, and execution. Gladia stood out not only for their deep experience in cloud and AI, with leadership from companies like OVHcloud, but also for their relentless focus on solving real problems. Their vision aligns with the growing potential we see in voice AI, and we believe they are positioned to lead this space as applications scale rapidly in the coming years," — comments Andrew Tymovskyi, Principal at Roosh Ventures. Gladia, go big!⚡️ #VoiceAI #RooshVentures #Gladia #Tech

The rise of AI-powered platforms is transforming industries, economies, and societal structures. The future is clear: integrating artificial intelligence into everyday operations will become essential for survival in the digital age. A significant shift is happening where traditional boundaries between tech companies and other industries are blurring. Every business will need to adopt a tech-centric strategy to thrive. However, not every business owner has the expertise to leverage technology. This is where accelerators like MVP Ventures come into play. MVP Ventures supports those who lack the technical skills to build thriving businesses globally. They provide expertise in software development, marketing, product management, and venture capitalism, focusing on nurturing startups to survive in the digital space. Read more here: https://bit.ly/3R88SVb

🚀 𝐆𝐥𝐞𝐚𝐧'𝐬 𝐒𝐨𝐚𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐒𝐮𝐜𝐜𝐞𝐬𝐬 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 $𝟐𝟔𝟎𝐌 𝐒𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐬 𝐄 𝐅𝐮𝐧𝐝𝐢𝐧𝐠! 💰 Generative AI startup Glean has just reached a massive milestone, raising $260M in a Series E round, pushing its valuation to an incredible $4.6B! 🎉 Co-led by Altimeter & DST Global, with backing from Craft Ventures, Sapphire Ventures, SoftBank Vision Fund 2, and more, Glean is making waves in the AI world. 🌍 Founded by Arvind Jain, Glean's AI-powered Workplace Search platform is revolutionizing how companies access internal data. From multi-step prompts to AI-powered summaries and seamless integrations with Zendesk and Salesforce, Glean is shaping the future of enterprise AI! 💡 #AI #GenerativeAI #EnterpriseAI #TechInnovation #AIStartups #WorkplaceSearch #AIRevolution #AIIgniteStudio #Funding #AIAdvancements

Top 5 funding rounds of the week: 📌 1. Sentient - developing an open-source AI platform aimed at building community-driven artificial general intelligence Founded by: Sandeep Nailwal Raised: $85 million in seed funding. Investors included Founders Fund, Pantera Capital, Framework Ventures, Robot Ventures, Delphi, Republic, and Arrington Capital. 📌 2. Prodia - API and large-scale GPU infrastructure for AI-powered image generation integration Founded by: Shawn Wilkinson Raised: $15 million in seed funding. Investors included Dragonfly Capital, HashKey Capital, Web3.com, Index Ventures, Symbolic Capital, OKX Ventures, EV3, Artichoke, TRGC, Folius, Tangent Capital, Southern Equity, Balaji Srinivasan, and Polygon founder Sandeep Nailwal. 📌 3. Phaidra - develops control systems to optimize the performance of industrial facilities, including data centers Founded by: Jim Gao Raised: $12 million in funding. Investors included Index Ventures. 📌 4. Redactive - tools for data synchronization to help enterprises deploy generative AI applications Founded by: Alexander Valente Raised: $7.5 million in seed funding. Investors included Felicis Ventures, Blackbird Ventures, Atlassian Ventures, and Zapier. 📌 5. Steep - enabling users to query data in natural language and generate visualizations for accessible data exploration and analysis Founded by: Johan Baltzar and Nino Höglund Raised: $4.3 million in seed funding. Investors included Connect Ventures, Inventure, Alliance VC, Antler, and Greens. Congrats to everyone!