Unique Research · Company / Weekly Digest · October 28, 2024
Funding — China
Xunlu AI (驯鹿AI): ¥60M strategic round led by IDG Capital & Shanda Capital (Wanshi, Yuanhe advisory) — smart CS/sales robots for e-commerce, finance, etc. Differentiator: scene-custom deploy frameworks, near-human interaction, multi-model collaboration; self-built PromptFlow + automated test harness to curb LLM hallucination for commercial accuracy. Strategic tie-up with Baichuan for sales/CS automation.
Funding — Overseas
Pharos (YC S24): $5M seed led by Felicis — AI for hospital quality reporting; auto-extract unstructured EMR data into clinical registry forms. Founders Felix Brann, Matthew Jones, Dr. Alex Clarke (Imperial AI PhD).
Alimetry (NZ): $18M Series A2 — non-invasive wearable GI diagnostics; 64-electrode abdominal array → cloud/AI biomarkers; 30+ hospitals US/UK/NZ; four FDA clearances; commercialize US-first.
Neysa (India): $30M Series A — AI/ML infra & platforms (Velocis on-demand compute; developer platform + inference-as-a-service by year-end); public + private clusters on open stack; ~55 staff; Sharad Sanghi.
Granola: $20M Series A — collaborative AI meeting notes (user bullets + AI fill-in); Mac + calendar; Zoom/Meet/Slack/Teams/WebEx; 5× users since May; ~5k weekly; >half leadership; team/enterprise pricing + mobile next year.
Interface.ai: $30M first external round led by Avataar — voice/text AI agents for banks (mortgage changes, account open); >100 N. America FIs, millions of daily interactions, tens of millions ARR; grow 120-person NA/India team.
Highlight (spun from Medal): $10M led by General Catalyst (Valor, SV Angel, Conviction Embed; Medal put in $3M of its July $13M) — desktop AI assistant over screenshots/voice/docs + system-audio meeting Q&A; community prompts + agent framework; free now, word-based pricing later.
Industry moves
SenseTime large layoff after Xu Li’s 10th-anniversary letter (AI 1.0 = R&D headcount vs AI 2.0 = compute). Keep Ririxin models + large device; adjust security/AV/healthcare; N+1 severance. 2018–2023 cumulative loss ¥50.324B; H1’24 rev ¥1.74B (+21.4%), net loss ¥2.477B (−21.2% YoY); GenAI rev ¥1.05B (+255.7%) = 60.4% of sales.
Qiniu Cloud lists HKEX (2567) Oct 16 — ~159.75M shares; HK public 19.87× / international 1.02× subscribed. #2 China A/V APaaS; 2023 share MPaaS 5.8% / APaaS 14.1%. Rev 2021–23 ¥1.471B / ¥1.147B / ¥1.334B; Q1’24 +26.2% to ¥342M. AIGC push: A/V gen, vision, 3D scenes.
Waveform Intelligence acquired into OPPO — CEO Jiang Yuchen (Eleanor; ZJU + ETH; ex-MSRA) & core team join. Weaver Chinese long-form model; “Wawa Writing” assistant. OPPO AI Center / 1+N agents; AndesGPT; aim ~50M GenAI phones in 2024.
Zhipu AutoGLM — Phone Use agent mimicking human phone ops via WebRL; beats peers on AndroidLab & WebArena-Lite; AutoGLM Web plugin; framed as L3 tool step toward AGI ladder.
Nvidia × India: Reliance AI infra; Tech Mahindra Indus 2.0 Hindi model; Tata Communications & Yotta tens of thousands of H100s; Flipkart & Zoho Hindi LLMs; >100k Indian AI developers trained.
SK Group acquires Vietnam semis firm ISCVina for $300M.
xAI ships Grok API “grok-beta” — $5 / $15 per 1M input/output tokens; function calling (not yet live); Flux image gen on X.
People
Zhou Chang (ex-Qwen tech lead; PKU PhD 2017; Alibaba “Zhonghuang”; M6 multimodal core) quietly joins ByteDance at senior level — after earlier “leaving to found” reports. Other AI joins: ModelBest’s Qin Yujia, 01.AI’s Huang Wenhao. Alibaba Cloud chief communications scientist Xie Chongjin also said to be founding.
Aaron Chatterji — OpenAI’s first chief economist (ex-Biden Commerce chief economist; Obama CEA; Duke professor) on AI × growth/jobs; Chip Act experience may help OpenAI chip work. Same day: Scott Schools (ex-Deputy AG / Uber compliance) as chief compliance officer.
Miles Brundage leaves OpenAI AGI readiness / policy research for freer nonprofit advocacy; economic research moves under Chatterji; urges staff to “speak up.”
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