Unique Research · Company / Weekly digest · August 12, 2024
China funding
01.AI (零一万物) — LLM firm founded by Kai-Fu Lee closes a hundreds-of-millions-of-USD round with international strategic investors and a Southeast Asia consortium; details undisclosed. Team from Google, Microsoft, IBM, Baidu.
Yida Tech / Easyship Digital Employees (壹沓科技) — digital-employee robots; B+ led by CDH VGC, with Xinshang Capital; Index Capital FA. Focus manufacturing, logistics, wholesale/retail; six hyper-automation cores + LLM digital-employee platform. (CEO Bian Xiaoyu)
Metaso / Mita Tech (秘塔科技) — >¥100M round led by Ant Group, Lightspeed China follows; post-money ~$150M (LatePost). Founder Min Kerui (ex-Boson Data, acquired by Ant 2015); products include legal AI translation, writing tools, and search.
Integer Intelligence (整数智能) — AI data services; tens of millions RMB A led by FreeS Fund, with Oufang Angel. MooreData platform; 1,000+ clients; 4D labeling + multimodal datasets for AD / genAI / embodied AI.
Fxiaoke (纷享销客) — CRM; additional $75M despite soft SaaS market.
Overseas funding
Neon — AI/serverless Postgres; $25.6M strategic from Microsoft M12.
Cohere — Canada enterprise LLM; $500M Series D at $5.5B; backers include Nvidia, Oracle, Salesforce Ventures, Fujitsu (joint-dev for Japan). Cumulative ~$970M; limited post-round layoffs, selective hiring continues. (AI Business)
Groq — AI inference chips; $640M led by BlackRock; cumulative >$1B; valuation $2.8B (2× Apr 2021 when Tiger/D1 led $300M).
DevRev — AI-native platform; $100.8M Series A.
Intelmatix — MENA enterprise AI (Riyadh/London/Boston); $20M Series A; EDIX platform launched Mar 2024 — among region’s largest in class.
Napkin — “visual AI” text→diagrams; $10M; founders Pramod Sharma & Jerome Scholler (ex-Google; sold Osmo). Web-first; exports common formats.
Mechanical Orchard — modernize legacy apps with AI; $50M Series B led by GV; cumulative $74M. CEO Rob Mee (ex-Pivotal).
Opal (ex-Opal Camera) — consumer AI hardware; $60M Series B led by OpenAI Startup Fund; Casey Neistat, Charli & Dixie D’Amelio; Founders Fund, Kindred expected. Altman’s consumer-device interest (Humane; Jony Ive collab) noted.
Lumi — AI content co. by Colin Kaepernick; $4M early round led by Alexis Ohanian’s Seven Seven Six; comics/graphic novels first.
Events & people
Moonshot AI (月之暗面) — market talk of Tencent in a $300M round lifting valuation to $3.3B; Star Market Daily sources near the co. confirm Tencent; company/Tencent no comment.
John Schulman → Anthropic — OpenAI co-founder / superalignment lead leaves Microsoft-backed OpenAI for Amazon-backed Anthropic to deepen alignment work and return to the technical front line; says departure is not a critique of OpenAI’s alignment commitment. Altman credited Schulman’s early strategic insight. CN note also frames him alongside Ilya Sutskever’s exit path; another OpenAI co-founder/GC coverage continues in same item.
Ex-Shanda Games VP — founds AI-games startup (title board; body light).
LG EXAONE 3.0 — first Korean-language foundation model release.
Glean — in talks for ~$250M new round; ARR ~$55M, path to ~$100M by year-end; prior Feb round >$200M at $2.2B. (WSJ)
Nvidia Blackwell — design flaw delays mass shipments of next-gen AI chips into Q1 (production still ramping H2); MSFT/GOOGL/Meta ordered billions. (after partner-supply messaging from 2024)
SoundHound acquires Amelia AI for $80M — enterprise conversational AI scale-up.