Top AI startup news of the week: AI is more than just Microsoft and Google

Headlines in the world of AI have been dominated this week by rumors of a new search engine warwith Microsoft and its former partner OpenAI, master of the phenomenon that is ChatGPT, taking on the stalwart Google and his prosaic Bard.

As the industry titans clash, it’s important to realize that there are many more players in the AI ​​space creating innovations. This past week was no exception – with a healthy dose of activity and even a bit of magic, some “shine” (AI) and even a Moonhub.

1. Is it AI or is it magic?

There are those who may feel that modern AI is a form of magic. While that’s not the technical truth, there is at least one startup hoping to bring a little bit of magic to the world of AI.

Startup in San Francisco Magic announced a $23 million round of funding this week. Magic develops software engineering technology that it refers to as an “AI peer.” The technology used natural language to help programmers better understand and collaborate on software development.

“Our mission is to use AI to accelerate science and make the world more productive. For decades, technology was just a tool; soon it will be a colleague,” Magic co-founder and CEO Eric Steinberger said in a rack. “The adoption of ‘AI assistants’ in the workplace will be as impactful as the industrial revolution, and it is important to make this transition smooth.”

2. GlossAi Raises $8 Million for Generative Video AI (V-AI)

Generative AI is all the rage for text and graphics, and it’s also starting to make waves in the video world. Tel-Aviv, located in Israel GlossAi announced this week that it raised $8 million in a launch round.

The promise of GlossAi is an AI technology that can intelligently help organizations quickly generate video content in a fraction of the time it would have taken with more traditional approaches to video creation. According to the company, its technology “analyzes hundreds of parameters such as text, tone, tempo, facial expressions and audience engagement using billions of data points, achieving human-like content generation in near real-time.”

3. Kognitos brings in $6.8 million to develop generative AI for business automation

Did we mention generative AI is hot? will know is yet another generative AI startup making headlines this week, raising seed funding of $6.8 million.

Kognitos uses generative AI to build out a business automation platform called Koncierge. The platform is intended to enable the simple creation of what would otherwise be complex business processes to produce.

“We are unlocking the power of AI for humanity. Now anyone can use Generative AI to automate whatever they want – using only English,” Binny Gill, founder and CEO of Kognitos, wrote in a statement. rack. “It’s time for computers to act like humans and humans to stop behaving like machines.”

4. Moonhub wants to help improve the hiring process with AI, raising $4.4 million in seed

There is no shortage of startups covered here on VentureBeat that are actively trying to improve the hiring process. Moon hub can now be added to that list.

Moonhub raised a $4.4 million seed round this week to help the company build out its talent management and recruiting technology. And yes, Moonhub claims to use “advanced generative AI” as well, according to her FAQto help organizations attract talent faster and more successfully.

5. Mattiq raises $15 million seed funding to develop sustainable materials with AI

Chicago based-Mattiq uses its materials science AI technology to help organizations create a new generation of sustainable materials. The company announced this week that it has raised $15 million in a seed round.

Mattiq has set itself a pretty daring goal: to predict that by 2024, the company will have synthesized and analyzed more than a trillion new material combinations using its advanced material AI technology.

“From the Stone Age to the Silicon Age, material discovery has been slow, unpredictable and limited by the performance of available materials,” said Mattiq founder and principal Chad Mirkin in a statement. rack. “Mattiq disrupts this status quo, resulting in discoveries that enable new technologies at a rate previously unimaginable.”

6. Entropik seeks to boost AI-powered market research with $25 million Series B

AI also influences the work of market research.

This week Bengaluru, India-based Entropik announced it has raised $25 million in a Series B funding round. The company wants to use the money to expand in the US, European and Asian markets.

Entropik’s technology helps organizations better understand consumer preferences. It does that with AI innovations, including numerous patents for eye tracking and face coding. The company claims its face coding technology, which captures a user’s facial expressions, can be quantified for accurate sentiment analysis.

7. Customer experience AI vendor Ushur raises $50 million on Series C

Located in Santa Clara, California Oesur aims to help improve its Customer Experience Automation (CXA) platform with the $50 million Series C funding round announced this week.

The Ushur platform uses AI for a variety of processes and has an approach it calls “Conversational Apps” that offer a no-code approach to building processes that involve conversations between users and a business. The apps use AI for natural language processing and automation.

“The previous generation of business automation was designed for infrastructure processes,” said Simha Sadasiva, CEO and co-founder of Ushur, in a statement. rack. “We built Ushur’s AI platform with a different goal in mind: to deliver outstanding customer experiences at scale and deliver meaningful interactions that put customer needs first.”

8. MindsDB wants to help organizations get more machine learning into applications

MindsDB announced that it raised $16.5 million in Series A funding this week as it continues to build out its open-source-based machine learning (ML) platform that helps organizations build their own AI-powered applications.

VentureBeat first covered MindsDB back in 2020 when it raised its $3 million starting round. The company has grown in the years since and benefited from integrations with Open AI And Hugging face to bring both generative AI and natural language processing power into a database-driven application.

“Today there is a huge interest in the developer community to implement and integrate machine learning into their applications, but the process is complicated and expensive,” said Chetan Puttagunta, general partner at Benchmark in a statement. rack. “MindsDB empowers developers from small startups to the largest enterprises in the world by enabling developers to quickly and efficiently run ML models of their choice with the database of their choice.”