🔥 Hot Takes Tuesday for 2024-08-06
Rapid fire analysis on funds, funding, M&A, IIoT impact, content licensing, and cybersecurity trends.
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(Scroll to the end…)
Off the cuff analysis in a rapid fire format.
Let’s dig in…
Funds, Funding, and M&A
Techmeme: KNIME, an open-source data science and AI platform used by AMD, Audi, and ~400 other customers, raised $30M from Invus, taking its total funding to $50M (Kyle Wiggers/TechCrunch)
By Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch. View the full context on Techmeme.
💰 + 🍪 This is a friendly reminder that $30M goes a very long way when companies are able to consider alternatives to NVIDIA such as AMD.
Techmeme: Seattle-based industrial analytics startup Seeq raised a $50M Series D led by Sixth Street Growth, bringing its total raised to ~$165M (Lisa Stiffler/GeekWire)
By Lisa Stiffler / GeekWire. View the full context on Techmeme.
🏭 + 🤖 The size and impact of IIoT cannot be understated as well as the insights it will provide by harnessing of the data it will produce.
Techmeme: ProRata, which aims to attribute and share AI chatbot subscription revenue with content owners, raised a $25M Series A and inks deals with major media companies (Sara Fischer/Axios)
By Sara Fischer / Axios. View the full context on Techmeme.
📚 + 🤖 If content is king, then perhaps legitimate licensing of content will render princely sums to creators of content (as compared to overt scraping of content creator works to train models for profile without any licensing consideration of the creators impacted).
Techmeme: Abnormal Security, which uses ML and AI to detect email cyberattacks, raised a $250M Series D at a $5.1B valuation, up from $4B after raising $210M in May 2022 (Chris Metinko/Crunchbase News)
By Chris Metinko / Crunchbase News. View the full context on Techmeme.
🔐 + 🤖 If there is one trend in cybersecurity, it is the constant drum beat of spy vs. spy competition between those with data to protect and those with angles to intercept and leverage that data.
Techmeme: AI chip startup Groq raised a $640M Series D led by BlackRock at a $2.8B valuation, up from $1B after raising $300M in 2021, and adds a former Intel exec as COO (Anne VanderMey/Bloomberg)
By Anne VanderMey / Bloomberg. View the full context on Techmeme.
💰 + 🍪 Hiring a former Intel executive around the time of a Series D for a Language Processing Unit (LPU) company is an intriguing play and speaks to the growing interest in development of alternatives to NVIDIA.
Note: Some images via Unsplash
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