The Linux Foundation today announced the launch of the Open Platform for Enterprise AI (OPEA), a project to foster the development of open, multi-provider and composable (i.e.
modular) generative AI systems.
Now, OPEA’s members are very clearly invested (and self-interested, for that matter) in building tooling for enterprise generative AI.
Domino offers a suite of apps for building and auditing business-forward generative AI.
And VMWare — oriented toward the infrastructure side of enterprise AI — last August rolled out new “private AI” compute products.
Google VidsLeveraging AI to help customers develop creative content is something Big Tech is looking for, and Tuesday, Google introduced its version.
Read moreImagen 2In February, Google announced an image generator built into Gemini, Google’s AI-powered chatbot.
“Vertex AI Agent Builder allows people to very easily and quickly build conversational agents,” Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian said.
Read moreNvidia’s Blackwell platformOne of the anticipated announcements is Nvidia’s next-generation Blackwell platform coming to Google Cloud in early 2025.
This, Kyle Wiggers writes, is “Google’s most capable generative AI model,” and is now available in public preview on Vertex AI, Google’s enterprise-focused AI development platform.
Don’t have time to catch the Google Cloud Next livestream?
Here’s whyNvidia’s Blackwell platformOne of the anticipated announcements is Nvidia’s next-generation Blackwell platform coming to Google Cloud in early 2025.
Read moreImagen 2In February, Google announced an image generator built into Gemini, Google’s AI-powered chatbot.
Read moreChrome Enterprise PremiumMeanwhile, Google is expanding its Chrome Enterprise product suite with the launch of Chrome Enterprise Premium.
This, Kyle Wiggers writes, is “Google’s most capable generative AI model,” and is now available in public preview on Vertex AI, Google’s enterprise-focused AI development platform.
To make all of this easier, Zip today announced Zip Premier, a set of new enterprise capabilities, as well as a new low-code integration platform that allows its users to build their own integrations to tap into services that Zip itself doesn’t support with its existing connectors.
And to make it easier to onboard new customers, Zip is also launching a set of 100 pre-built workflow templates today.
Zip is going up against several other procurement platforms from the likes of Coupa, SAP, Workday and more.
“Traditional procurement solutions don’t meet the complex needs of modern enterprises who face an intricate web of fractured procurement processes across many business teams and systems,” he said.
“Developed alongside our largest enterprise customers, our new capabilities streamline the entire spending process, delivering enterprise grade performance with consumer-grade flexibility so our customers can drive compliance and scale with speed.”
In its early days, OctoAI focused almost exclusively on optimizing models to run more effectively.
With the rise of generative AI, the team then launched the fully managed OctoAI platform to help its users serve and fine-tune existing models.
OctoStack, at its core, is that OctoAI platform, but for private deployments.
Deploying OctoStack should be straightforward for most enterprises, as OctoAI delivers the platform with read-to-go containers and their associated Helm charts for deployments.
For developers, the API remains the same, no matter whether they are targeting the SaaS product or OctoAI in their private cloud.
The 13-year-old cash-back startup looks to make its public debut after turning profitable and recording impressive revenue growth in 2023.
The company reported $320 million in revenue in 2023, up 52% from 2022 when it produced $210 million in revenue.
Ibotta’s gross profits grew 68% from 2022, $164.5 million, to 2023, $276 million.
According to the S-1, this partnership plays a big role in Ibotta’s revenue boost.
“Our revenue growth significantly accelerated with the addition of new publishers to the IPN,” according to the S-1.
So Chen founded NewRetirement, a Mill Valley-based company building software to help people create financial retirement plans.
Today, NewRetirement’s direct-to-consumer products power financial planning for 70,000 users managing close to $100 billion in their own financial plans, according to Chen.
And while 37% of respondents say that they work with a financial adviser, two-thirds of Americans believe that their financial planning needs improvement, according to Northwestern Mutual’s Planning and Progress Study 2023.
Now, you might wonder, what makes NewRetirement different from startups like Retirable, which similarly provides an array of retirement planning tools and access to asset managers?
Chen asserts that NewRetirement is one of the few — and perhaps only — financial planning platform that serves consumers as well as advisers and workplaces.
“And the product was electricity.”He was comparing this — turning raw material into something else that have value — to the notion of data centers, which are purely money pits.
“There’s a new Industrial Revolution happening in these [server] rooms: I call them AI factories,” Huang said.
“The raw material that goes in is data and electricity.
It’s very valuable.”The distinction makes a lot of sense in a world where Nvidia benefits tremendously if it can persuade companies to think of data centers and AI tools in a different way.
“The last time, data centers went into your company’s cost centers and capital expenditure.
At its GTC conference, Nvidia today announced Nvidia NIM, a new software platform designed to streamline the deployment of custom and pre-trained AI models into production environments.
NIM takes the software work Nvidia has done around inferencing and optimizing models and makes it easily accessible by combining a given model with an optimized inferencing engine and then packing this into a container, making that accessible as a microservice.
Nvidia is already working with Amazon, Google and Microsoft to make these NIM microservices available on SageMaker, Kubernetes Engine and Azure AI, respectively.
Some of the Nvidia microservices available through NIM will include Riva for customizing speech and translation models, cuOpt for routing optimizations and the Earth-2 model for weather and climate simulations.
“Created with our partner ecosystem, these containerized AI microservices are the building blocks for enterprises in every industry to become AI companies.”
Thus, SaaS startups are not category-specific, instead sharing a business model approach more than any particular industry focus.
Among myriad SaaS startups, those focused on selling to business clients — a group often called enterprise SaaS — are a magnet for venture capital.
Since then, investment into enterprise SaaS startups has slowed.
Enterprise SaaS startups raised $21.9 billion, $45.0 billion, $55.1 billion and $58.3 billion in 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2020, respectively.
Perhaps a rate cut or two and a strong enterprise IPO are the tonic required to really reignite venture investment into enterprise SaaS.
