Unique Research · Weekly AI Worldview · July 1, 2024
One week of global AI funding, events, and people. CN charts/boards — attach on ingest (20 images).
Funding
- APIGen — $500k from Varana Capital (Denver). High-school founders Christopher Fitzgerald & Nicholas Van Landschoot; automated API platform; MVP near; beta this month.
- METiS Pharmaceuticals (剂泰医药) — $100M Series C, CICC Capital lead; Taiping HK Sci-Tech Fund etc. Total raised near $300M. AI + drug delivery / discovery; founded 2020.
- Iambic Therapeutics — $50M Series B (Jun 18), Mubadala Capital & Exor Ventures; advance clinical/preclinical incl. IAM1363 (solid tumors / resistance). Founded 2019, California.
- GalaxyBot (银河通用机器人) — ¥700M angel: Meituan, BAIC, SenseTime, iFlytek strategic + Source Code, Qiming, etc.; Guangyuan Capital exclusive FA. Embodied LLM generalization; G1 robot; commercial push within the year for consumer tasks.
- Etched — $120M, Primary Venture & Positive Sum lead; angels incl. Peter Thiel, GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke, Balaji Srinivasan. Harvard dropouts Chris Zhu & Gavin Uberti; Sohu Transformer ASIC claimed ~20× faster than H100 on LLMs at lower power.
Events
- Cerebras confidentially preparing IPO; ~$720M raised; valuation ~$4.2–5.0B; WSE-3 ~46,000+ mm² / 4 trillion transistors; Altman / G42 ties noted.
- OpenAI API geo limits from Jul 9 for unsupported regions incl. mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau — pressure on “wrapper” startups; possible push toward domestic models.
- HeyGen after $60M Series A adds CCO Dave King, CTO Rong Yan, Trust & Safety Lavanya Poreddy (Benchmark among backers).
- Alibaba Cloud Tongyi Lingma on Visual Studio Marketplace; 3.5M+ downloads across IDEs; 200+ languages; personal pro temporarily free; free + enterprise tiers planned.
- 01.AI Yi models on Alibaba Cloud Bailian APIs (Yi-Large, Large-Turbo, Large-RAG, Medium); limited free quota; Bailian serves 200k+ enterprises.
- NVIDIA × Ooredoo — AI tech into data centers in Qatar, Algeria, Tunisia, Oman, Kuwait; Ooredoo $1B DC expansion; B2B GenAI access claimed 1–2 years ahead of peers.
- OpenAI acquires Multi (Jun 24) — remote collab (10-person screen share, smart file links); founders Alexander Embiricos (ex-Dropbox PM) & Charley Ho (ex-Google); 5 join OpenAI; Multi to shut after Jul 24; ~$13M prior from Greylock, First Round. Follows Rockset deal.
- Apple × EPFL 4M-21 — multimodal vision model spanning 21 modalities; ~3B params; ~50M-sample training; text, multimodal edit, 3D detection; paths to AV, medical imaging, AR.
- Robam “Food God” (食神) — claimed first cooking-focused AI LLM; personalized recipes/nutrition from mood, body, environment signals.
- BPAA 4th edition — 700+ teams, 15 countries, 60+ cities; TiMotion AI (Unique Partner) named TOP50 in commercial algorithm / startup track for marketing AIGC automation.
- Zhihu Zhida (知乎直答) — AI Q&A on Zhihai Tu AI / CPM-Bee lineage, 100B-class params; zhida.ai PC search + follow-up.
People
- Wang Yuan (ex-NetEase) founds Hangzhou Jiuhen Tech as CEO — personal-data-centric general office assistant (meetings, replies, docs); eng lead Chen Chengfeng (ex-Xiaoying co-founder); seed with USD fund; hiring product/algo.
- Adept → Amazon AGI autonomy — David Luan + four co-founders join Rohit Prasad’s team; Adept remains independent on foundation models/enterprise tools after $350M raise / ≥$1B valuation.
- SoftBank AGM — Masayoshi Son on ASI as AGI evolution (100–10,000× human intelligence); Vision Fund wins; net assets ¥34T; Arm on GenAI chips.
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