Unique Research · Company / Weekly Digest · October 8, 2024
China funding
VAST AI — multi-hundred-million-RMB (angel + Pre-A), said to be the largest raise on the 3D foundation-model track. General 3D LLMs / AIGC 3D content; new Tripo 2.0 (DiT + U-Net hybrid) generates shape geometry + texture/materials in ~10 seconds. Goal: mass-market 3D creation tools and a 3D UGC platform. Team from top global universities/labs.
Bot Auto (TuSimple co-founder Hou Xiaodi) — $20M Pre-A led by Linear Capital; Houston HQ; L4 autonomous trucks for logistics. Quiet until this raise; focus on next-gen trucking tech (safety + ops efficiency). Explicitly: no blind ops scale-up, no premature hiring, no distracting over-expansion/partner debt before ops mature.
Overseas funding
OpenAI — $6.6B new round at $157B valuation; Thrive Capital led; Microsoft, Nvidia, SoftBank among participants; total raised ~$17.9B. Use: research lead, compute, tools for hard problems. ChatGPT cited >250M users; annualized revenue reported past $3.4B. Competitive pressure from Runway/Luma (video) and Anthropic, etc. Exploring ChatGPT Plus price hikes and possible structure reform (incl. exiting nonprofit governance) for capital-heavy chip/data-center bets and less Nvidia dependency.
11x.ai — ~$50M Series B led by a16z at ~$350M valuation (prior A was $24M at $90M early 2024). Founder/CEO Hasan Sukkar: on path to ~$10M ARR. “Automated digital employees”: Alice (lead gen/research/outreach); Jordan (AI phone SDR, 30+ languages, two-way). May expand digital-employee line beyond sales.
Numa — $32M Series B (Touring Capital + Mitsui led; Costanoa, Threshold, Gradient) — $48M total. AI/automation for auto dealers (missed-call salvage, service bookings). Narrowed from broad conversational AI to auto vertical. Hire AI/ML eng; more auto-specific models.
VESSL AI (Korea MLOps) — $12M Series A to accelerate infra. Multi-cloud + spot instances cut GPU cost up to ~80%; targets custom LLMs and vertical AI agents. ~50 enterprise customers (Hyundai, LIG Nex1, Uber, TMAP Mobility, Yanolja, Upstage, ScatterLab, Wrtn.ai); Oracle + Google Cloud partnerships; 2,000+ users. Products: Run / Serve / Pipelines / Cluster.
Poolside — $500M Series B led by Bain Capital Ventures (eBay, Nvidia, LG Tech Ventures, Felicis, etc.) — $626M total, $3B valuation. Ex-GitHub CTO Jason Warner + Eiso Kant; AI coding assist. Plan: stand up 10k Nvidia GPUs for future models + GTM/R&D. GitHub Copilot cited >1.8M paid users; Polaris sees AI coding tools ~$27B by 2032.
Qodo (ex-CodiumAI) — $40M Series A led by Susa + Square Peg — $50M total. Code gen + testing + quality; 1M+ developers tried; Fortune 100 on enterprise platform. VS Code/JetBrains extensions; git agents for GitHub/GitLab/Bitbucket; Chrome + CLI. “Task-aware coding” via NL intent; upcoming Qodo UX for UI testing by simulating human users.
Series Entertainment / Series AI — $28M Series A (Netflix, Dell Tech Capital; follow-ons a16z, BITKRAFT, F4). Rho Engine — AI-native multimodal full-stack game-creation platform (vision + audio); aims to be a new Unity for builders. Headcount 17 → 100+ (Zynga, Machine Zone, Google, Snap alumni). AI in design; NPCs that bargain autonomously with players.
Industry moves
China: MiniMax? No — ModelBest (面壁智能) × Great Wall Motor strategic deal on in-car / on-device LLMs (MiniCPM series + Coffee GPT + Jiuzhou supercompute). RockAI launched Yan 1.3 swarm-intelligence unit multimodal model — MCSD neural arch replacing Transformer attention + brain-like partitioned activation; offline lossless deploy; demos on “Feilong” drone, “Panghu” robot, “Xuntu” assistant; Nvidia/Qualcomm hardware.
Overseas: Samsung + TSMC in talks with UAE on large fabs — Mubadala central; potential >$100B investment (WSJ); early stage, tech/talent/U.S. export concerns. KT Group × Microsoft 5-year strategic pact — Korea-localized AI/cloud, ecosystem R&D, tens of thousands of AI talent; possible joint AI-transformation entity; innovation center at KT Gwanghwamun. Salesforce to acquire enterprise knowledge platform Zoomin (after Own this month) — unify product docs/tutorials; customers McAfee, Dell, Burger King, Tim Hortons, Popeyes; $73M raised historically; expected close FY2025 Q4 (Jan 31) into Data Cloud. Amazon, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI et al. among 100+ first signatories of EU AI Pact (voluntary commitments bridging AI Act enforcement gap): AI governance strategy; map high-risk systems; staff AI literacy. Apple and Meta absent (Meta focuses compliance on the Act itself — fines up to 7% global revenue). Also missing: Anthropic, Nvidia, Mistral, Aleph Alpha.
People
Tim Brooks — Sora co-lead left OpenAI for Google DeepMind (video gen / “world simulators”); early Sora researcher from Jan 2023. Part of a wave including Mira Murati, Bob McGrew, Barret Zoph, Andrej Karpathy, Ilya Sutskever, Jan Leike, John Schulman, Greg Brockman (leave/sabbatical).
Durk Kingma — OpenAI co-founder joining Anthropic (mostly remote Netherlands); prior Google Brain / DeepMind path; GenAI foundations (DALL·E 3, ChatGPT). Anthropic also hired Leike, Schulman; Mike Krieger as CPO.
Mira Murati — OpenAI CTO announced departure; Bob McGrew (Chief Research Officer) and research VP Barret Zoph left alongside — McGrew: time for a break, confidence in leadership; Zoph: natural time to explore outside OpenAI.
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