If accurate, this latest injection of capital would value Moonshot AI at $2.5 billion – the largest single funding round for Chinese LLM developers on public record.
Co-leading the round are e-commerce giant Alibaba and HongShan – the VC firm formerly known as Sequoia China, according to South China Morning Post.
Other in the round included Chinese “super app” Meituan and Xiaohongshu (sometimes called China’s answer to Instagram), according to Chinese tech blog LatePost.
Pink Floyd Fan turned AI trailblazerYang Zhilin had a long list of achievements to his credit even before starting Moonshot.
The total amount raised by China’s AI firms amounted to roughly $2 billion, 70% less than the year before.
There’s a new generative AI startup based in Paris.
Bioptimus will leverage this unique data set to train its foundational model.
Creating new AI models is such a daunting task that creating a separate entity made more sense.
“As a ‘pure player’ in foundational models, Bioptimus is better set up to do this.”The startup has also signed a partnership with Amazon Web Services.
Now that Bioptimus is well funded, it’s time to work on the AI model and see what the biotech research community can do with it.
While the food tech investment sector figured itself out last year, Miruku, a New Zealand-based food tech company, was busy getting ahead of molecular farming technology.
Since the seed round, the company made advancements in its proprietary dairy seed system.
Initially, Miruku focused on programming plants to produce dairy proteins that could be extracted from seeds.
That approach has since expanded to leverage interactions between recombinant dairy casein and native plant proteins, with or without improved fatty acid profiles.
It was led by Motion Capital and included seed round investor Movac and new investor NZVC.
This week, we’re looking at a new finance-based dating app, Robinhood’s earnings results and the startup in which PayPal Ventures made its first investment.
Launched by financial platform Neon Money Club, Score is a dating app for people with good to excellent credit, and it seeks to help raise awareness about the importance of finances in relationships.
Dollars and centsFinom, a European challenger bank aimed at SMEs and freelancers, has raised €50 million ($54 million) in a Series B equity round of funding.
Rasa, an enterprise-focused conversational generative AI platform with financial services companies as clients, raised $30 million in a Series C round co-led by StepStone Capital and PayPal Ventures.
Cash App announced it will now offer “up to” a 4.5% APY (annual percentage yield) for its Cash App Savings customers, with a few caveats.
Plex CEO Keith Valory confirmed the round closed this month, but was unable to disclose Plex’s new valuation.
Recently, the company has been developing social features, as well, allowing Plex users to opt into a feature that tracks their viewing and shares it with friends.
To date, however, it’s Plex’s ad-supported streaming that’s been helping Plex grow its revenue.
And we’re in, at least, the top five if not higher in this space, and we feel like we’re doing really, really well,” he said.
As a result of Plex’s ability to track users’ media discovery behavior and consumption across platforms and services, the company has a unique perspective from a data standpoint.
Krutrim, an AI startup founded by Ola founder Bhavish Aggarwal, said it has raised a funding round that values it at $1 billion.
It’s also the first Indian AI startup to become a unicorn, it said.
Matrix Partners India — which has also backed Aggarwal’s other two startups, ride-hailing firm Ola and EV startup Ola Electric — led the $50 million “first round” in Krutrim, it said Friday.
The startup plans to launch a conversational AI assistant that understands and speaks multiple Indian languages, the startup said.
The startup plans to make a beta version of its eponymous chatbot available to consumers next month and follow it with rolling out APIs to developers and enterprises.
A $58M round for this European Mycelium startup shows the tech is on the cusp of big thingsInfinite Roots (IR), formerly Mushlabs, is a German biotech company which has been plying the furrow of Mycelium, the material coming from fungi which has been hailed as something of an answer to everything from food to building materials.
Existing investors, including Clay Capital, FoodLabs, Redalpine, Simon Capital and Happiness Capital also participated.
Prior to this round IR had raised a Series A of $10 million.
The company said it plans to use the new round to switch into commercial growth, expand its production capacities, and invest in launch activities.
For instance, last year Meati Foods moved into full-scale production of its mycelium-based whole-food protein, launching a “Mega Ranch,” in Colorado financed in part by a $150 million Series C round and an extension round of $22 million.
A $58M round for this European Mycelium startup shows the tech is on the cusp of big thingsInfinite Roots (IR), formerly Mushlabs, is a German biotech company which has been plying the furrow of Mycelium, the material coming from fungi which has been hailed as something of an answer to everything from food to building materials.
Existing investors, including Clay Capital, FoodLabs, Redalpine, Simon Capital and Happiness Capital also participated.
Prior to this round IR had raised a Series A of $10 million.
The company said it plans to use the new round to switch into commercial growth, expand its production capacities, and invest in launch activities.
For instance, last year Meati Foods moved into full-scale production of its mycelium-based whole-food protein, launching a “Mega Ranch,” in Colorado financed in part by a $150 million Series C round and an extension round of $22 million.
The company provides community and regional banks with end-to-end deposit management capabilities, including a deposit network so bank customers can grow, retain and manage their deposit base by sourcing deposits, sweeping funds and providing additional security to depositors.
In fact, ModernFi, founded in 2022 by Paolo Bertolotti and Adam DeVita, raised $4.5 million in a seed round a month prior to the SVB news.
Canapi Ventures led the round and was joined by Andreessen Horowitz, Remarkable Ventures and a group of banks including Huntington National Bank, First Horizon and Regions.
“On this whole notion of deposit growth, retention management became first, second and third priority for a lot of institutions.
Bertolotti plans to grow in engineering, new product development, compliance and regulatory adherence and in business development.
TravelPerk, a business travel management platform targeted at SMEs, has raised $105 million in a fresh equity-based round of financing led by SoftBank’s Vision Fund 2.
“In today’s climate, where startup funding is down by half and valuations are down across the board, this is a healthy and sober valuation,” Meir told TechCrunch.
Well-traveledFounded in 2015, Barcelona-based TravelPerk sells an all-in-one platform for companies to book, manage, and report all their domestic and international travel.
Customers can also extend the platform through integrations with expense management systems like Spendesk and HR software such as HiBob.
“[An] IPO has never been an objective per se for TravelPerk,” Meir said.
