Unique Research · Weekly AI Worldview · May 27, 2024
One week of global AI funding, events, and people. CN charts — attach on ingest (21 images).
Funding
- Recall.ai (YC) — $10M Series A; >$12M total. Meeting-data API across Google Meet, Zoom, etc. for sales coaching / note apps; team toward 16+ by year-end. (Recall.ai)
- CoLab Software — $21M Series B, Insight Partners lead + YC and others; NRR 158%; 30–40 hires (St. John’s HQ + CA/US remote) incl. sales/HR/CS VPs. Mech-engineering collaboration. (CoLab)
- Scale AI — $1B Series F at $13.8B valuation (Accel, Amazon, Intel, etc.). Data labeling for AV/robotics; OpenAI/Microsoft customers. (Bloomberg)
- Suno — $125M Series B at $500M val (Lightspeed, Founders Collective, Nat Friedman, etc.). >10M users in ~8 months; “Stone” >1M plays; Copilot integration. (Suno)
- H (Paris) — $220M seed; CEO Charles Kantor + DeepMind alums; 25 engineers/scientists; frontier action models / AI agents toward AGI. Accel, Bpifrance, Creandum + Amazon, Samsung, UiPath; angels Eric Schmidt, Yuri Milner. UiPath partnership. (H)
- DeepL — $300M at $2B valuation (2× YoY); Index lead + ICONIQ, IVP, Atomico. 60+ countries, >100k org customers; first overseas office Tokyo (Japan surge), U.S. next. DeepL Write Pro (Apr) with in-house LLM. (DeepL)
- Praktika — $35.5M Series A, Blossom Capital lead. AI language tutors; 1.2M users; ARR nearing $20M. (Praktika)
Events
- Reddit × OpenAI — Reddit content (1B+ posts / 16B+ comments) for model training; deal led by COO Brad Lightcap, independent board (Altman is Reddit’s 3rd-largest shareholder). Reddit pushes AI features + data licensing. (OpenAI)
- Sony Music — public ban on using its recordings/lyrics to train AI without permission; letters to hundreds of GenAI/streaming firms. (Sony / Billboard)
- Ampere × Qualcomm — low-power AI data-center chip, TSMC 3nm, target next year; prototype servers shown. (Ampere)
- Microsoft Copilot+ PC — on-device GPT-4o features (offline speech-to-text, multilingual translate, image gen/edit; Recall natural-language history search); Adobe deepen; multi-OEM launch Jun 18. (Microsoft)
- Samsung Bot-fit — wearable robot for mobility assistance, Q3 push from nursing-home pilots to B2C; robot team under CTO; also Humanoid (Jae-yong Lee) and Ballie home companion. (Chosun Daily)
- LG CLOi × Gemini — demo at Google Cloud Summit (27th next month); consumer launch as early as H2; smart-home AI Agent robot eyed next year. (LG)
- Autodesk × Wonder Dynamics — acquires Wonder Studio (AI/cloud 3D character anim & VFX tied to Maya); Flow automation push. (Autodesk)
- EU AI Act — formally adopted May 21; enters force ~20 days after publication; risk-tiered rules; fines up to 7% global turnover or €35M; extraterritorial; highest bans expected by end-2024. (European Council)
- Tencent Cloud Hunyuan — Hunyuan-lite free with 256k context; standard / standard-256k price cuts; Yuanqi free tokens to 100M. (Tencent Cloud)
- Baichuan 4 — May 22; +10% / +14% / +9% on general / math / code vs prior; SuperCLUE China #1; multimodal; AI assistant “Bai Xiaoying.” (Baichuan)
- Adept AI — exploring sale / strategic partners (e.g. Meta); $350M Series B, >$1B val; Fuyu-Heavy multimodal; agents for multi-software tasks. (Adept)
- FancyTech — LVMH Innovation Award (+ Immersive Digital Experience) at VivaTech 2024; GenAI 3D→video for luxury. LVMH also rolling MaIA (GPT-4) + Prompt Academy (1,500 staff in 2023 → 10,000). (VivaTech)
People
- Wang Xiaochuan (Baichuan) — on Big Tech model price cuts / free tiers: confidence signal; Baichuan skipping price war to focus health / happiness / creativity apps; Bai Xiaoying not rushed to monetize. (Baichuan)
- Wang Yuan — NetEase VP / NetEase Research & NetEase Shufan leader exits for GenAI startup; expects 2-year ToC innovation wave in US/EU. (Sina)
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