SV Angel’s Post

It’s been a big year for Captions, and it’s only July. Building on this momentum, we’re excited to announce our $60M Series C, led by Index Ventures. That brings our total capital raised to $100M, which we’ll be investing in AI video research right here in New York City. We built Captions to make it easy for anyone, anywhere to tell their story with a video — we believe that AI unlocks new possibilities to generate and edit talking videos, and that AI will change the future of video as we know it. Looking at the past year, there’s a lot to be proud of: we hit 10M+ global creators, launched a collection of world-first generative features, and our customers created over 3M videos each month — telling diverse stories, transcending language barriers, and even falling in love, as profiled in the New York Times. Our team also grew from 15 to 60 here in New York City. We’re thrilled to welcome back returning investors Kleiner Perkins, Andreessen Horowitz, and Sequoia Capital, and new investors Adobe Ventures, HubSpot Ventures, and Jared Leto to this round. We’re grateful for your support. Read more about our fundraise in Bloomberg News, covered by Rachel Metz. If you’re interested in joining a fast-moving team that’s defining the future of AI in video, check out our careers page: https://lnkd.in/gYQ-B8mm —we’d love to talk.

Law - one of the best mainstream applications of LLMs in 2023

The world of startups is being split into two by the arrival of generative AI (GenAI), and those who can leverage this new technology ahead of their peers will have a significant advantage in attracting funding, according to Dave Richards, co-founder and managing partner of Capria Ventures.

We talk a lot about the cost of entry of AI-driven startups right now. But more quietly, a growing set of teams are attacking the previous generation of systems of record. They're building more product out of the gate, because they can't be just point solutions. They make a little more investment in future roadmap, because there are several years of building out the product surface area. They need excellent teams, as founders and early hires need to move fast *and* consider the future implications. They have a higher hurdle in ecosystem, partnerships, or GTM. So this means raising rounds of $5-10M out of the gate, versus point solutions, which need $3-5M. And then you need to look at who can raise that capital without excessive dilution. All of this makes for a different early journey for the team and their investors, and a different set of risks. Thankfully, the size of the payoff makes it more than worthwhile for the right teams.

Top 5 funding rounds of the week: 📌 1. Hebbia - building Matrix, a product that allows users to create AI agents to complete end-to-end tasks. Founded by: George Sivulka Raised: $130 million in Series B funding from Andreessen Horowitz, Index Ventures, Google Ventures, and Peter Thiel 📌 2. Volley - developing AI-powered games that can be played using voice commands. Founded by: Max Child, James Wilsterman Raised: $55 million in Series C funding from M12 Ventures and Lightspeed 📌 3. Captions - an AI video editing startup Founded by: Gaurav Misra, Dwight Churchill Raised: $60 million in Series C funding from Index Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, Adobe Ventures, HubSpot Ventures, and actor Jared Leto 📌 4. Command Zero - developing investigative cybersecurity technology using large language models. Founded by: Dov Yoran, Dean De Beer, Alfred Huger Raised: $21 million in seed funding from Andreessen Horowitz 📌 5. ENSO - helping small and medium-sized businesses access preprogrammed AI agents to handle repetitive tasks. Founded by: Mickey Haslavsky Raised: $6 million in seed funding from NFX, Yossi Matias (head of Google Research), and Shmil Levy (former GP at Sequoia Capital) Congrats to everyone!

𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐆𝐞𝐧𝐞𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐞 𝐀𝐈 𝐋𝐚𝐧𝐝𝐬𝐜𝐚𝐩𝐞: 𝐏𝐥𝐚𝐭𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐦 𝐂𝐡𝐚𝐫𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐜𝐬 A few days ago, we published our annual Generative AI landscape covering the latest 270+ startups building across enterprise and verticals. We found a number of characteristics in these platforms including: 𝐂𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐭𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐬 𝐰𝐡𝐞𝐫𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐬𝐞 𝐩𝐥𝐚𝐭𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐦𝐬 𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐛𝐮𝐢𝐥𝐝𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐨𝐮𝐭 𝐨𝐟  🇺🇸 U.S 🇬🇧 U.K 🇩🇪 Germany 🇮🇳 India 🇮🇱 Israel 🇨🇦 Canada 𝐖𝐡𝐨 𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐦𝐨𝐬𝐭 𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐞 𝐢𝐧𝐯𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐨𝐫𝐬? Sequoia Capital Andreessen Horowitz Lightspeed Y Combinator Antler Techstars NVIDIA Khosla Ventures General Catalyst 500 Global GV (Google Ventures) Insight Partners 𝐖𝐡𝐞𝐧 𝐰𝐞𝐫𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐦𝐚𝐣𝐨𝐫𝐢𝐭𝐲 𝐨𝐟 𝐩𝐥𝐚𝐭𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐦𝐬 𝐟𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐝𝐞𝐝? Between 2020 - 2024. 𝐅𝐮𝐧𝐝𝐫𝐚𝐢𝐬𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐢𝐭𝐲  The pre-seed to Series A startups have raised over $1B. Read the insights in full 👉 https://lnkd.in/d6rS4qXD

It's common knowledge that you can't raise pre-seed investment based on just an idea in 2024. But what if you can...? Investors typically want to see something of substance–an MVP, maybe even some early market traction–before they'll put money into a startup in the current climate. But Rishi Kapoor and his co-founders at North AI are the exception that proves the rule. They've raised £300,000 in investment led by SFC Capital for a product they're only going to start building next month. How did they do it? I dug into the details... and looked at why founders can't expect this to be a new normal... in today's PreSeed Now:

Great and insightful work by Dr. Andre Retterath from Earlybird Venture Capital who just launched the Data-driven VC Landscape 2024 report 📃 . I personally see VC as a people driven business, however I agree with Andre that it is sometimes very limited in terms of the tools, resources and understanding of the data behind the market, valuations etc. What is beautiful about Venture Capital these days, is the ability of data to amplify the ability of investors to pick winners and fit to their portfolios and thesis. So even with AI 🤖 and the capabilities of models such as GPT-4, there is no replacement to human conviction. Data-Driven VC is a great resource to see the power of Data+Human 🚀 abilities, and how that could help invest and build new ventures with amazing and inspiring founders and help them scale. Here is the link to the 2024 report: https://lnkd.in/eKSMzwfk If you are on Product Hunt, give Andre some upvotes 👍 and comments (it's also a great community to connect with builders): https://lnkd.in/eEW_UFRz One of the key values is also the people the Data-Driven VC team identified as people to follow that are driving this mindset. Here are the TOP 20: Yuriy Groysman, Yohei Nakajima, Vlastimil Vodicka, Keith Teare, Amir Sani, PhD, Ties Boukema, Ryan Hoover, Rob Kniaz, Jerry Ye, Mike Arpaia, Guy Conway, Francesco Corea, PhD, Andreas Goeldi, Anastasia Gonotskaya, Alexis Ohanian Sr., Abel Samot, Gomathi Ramalingam, Adam Shuaib, PhD, Olivier Huez, Pietro Casella #venturecapital #data #startups #AI #investments

Aileen Lee of @CowboyVC underscores the enduring allure of unicorns in tech, touting AI startups and predicting a vibrant future IPO market. Explore her insights on venture dynamics and innovation.

To support rapid consumer adoption and expansion plans, Perplexity has raised $73.6 million in Series B funding from trusted VC firms and prominent tech visionaries. IVP led the round with continued support from Perplexity’s Seed and Series A investors NEA, Elad Gil, Nat Friedman, and Databricks, as well as new investors NVIDIA, Jeff Bezos (through Bezos Expeditions Fund), Tobi Lutke, Bessemer Venture Partners, Naval Ravikant, Balaji Srinivasan, Guillermo Rauch, Austen Allred, Factorial Funds, and Kindred Ventures, among others. Perplexity Founded in 2022, Perplexity was founded on the belief that searching for information should be a straightforward, efficient experience, free from the influence of advertising-driven models. Aravind Srinivas Google Microsoft Denis Yarats Cack Wilhelm Somesh Dash Cynthia Kuo Angela Zhu #funding #investment #vc #startups #funds #investors #AI