🔥 Hot Takes Tuesday for 2024-07-16
Tech funding and M&A trends in AI, cybersecurity, and GenAI discussed with a touch of humor.
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🔥 Hot Takes Tuesday for 2024-07-16
Off the cuff analysis in a rapid fire format.
Let’s dig in…
Funds, Funding, and M&A
Techmeme: San Jose-based DreamBig, which develops chiplet platforms and was founded in 2019, raised a $75M equity round co-led by Samsung Catalyst Fund and Sehat Sutardja (Chris Metinko/Crunchbase News)
By Chris Metinko / Crunchbase News. View the full context on Techmeme.
💰 + 🍪 While $75M might not seem like a lot of capital, in the hands of open platform approach, it goes a very long way when the capital comes from an entity with A.I. hardware portfolio companies.
Techmeme: Vectara, which offers Retrieval Augmented Generation AI tools for enterprises, raised a $25M Series A, following a $28.5M seed in 2023 (Sean Michael Kerner/VentureBeat)
By Sean Michael Kerner / VentureBeat. View the full context on Techmeme.
🗄️ + 🤖 While others highlight the creative GenAI use cases of movie stars eating pasta, I continue to believe that RAG focused GenAI is a compelling area for Enterprise use cases.
Techmeme: London-based Huma Therapeutics, which uses AI to help developers make health apps, raised an $80M Series D at a nearly-$1B valuation, for $300M in total funding (Saritha Rai/Bloomberg)
By Saritha Rai / Bloomberg. View the full context on Techmeme.
🏥 + 🤖 While Star Wars has the “Medical Droid”, I think it is more useful to imagine your doctor or the nurse having recall for all of your medical history for your entire life then being able to keep the human element intact.
Techmeme: Kindo, which helps enterprises securely adopt and manage AI tools, raised $20.6M led by Drive Capital, and buys open-source security project WhiteRabbitNeo (Dean Takahashi/VentureBeat)
By Dean Takahashi / VentureBeat. View the full context on Techmeme.
🔐 + 🤖 Money for cybersecurity companies is a thing and it also means that money M&A in the cybersecurity space is definitely a thing we’ll see more and more.
Techmeme: Sources: Alphabet is in advanced talks to acquire cybersecurity startup Wiz for roughly $23B; Wiz raised $1B at a $12B valuation in May 2024 (Lauren Thomas/Wall Street Journal)
By Lauren Thomas / Wall Street Journal. View the full context on Techmeme.
💰 + 🔐 I have no idea if this is real yet but if it turns out it is real then I have to mine up my LinkedIn post about Wiz from just 3 months ago…
Note: Some images via Unsplash
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