The Brief - Issue #4

Hello February! Punxsutawney Phil predicted an early spring! 🌱 While AI might replace many things, we hope this adorable groundhog doesn’t lose its job to AI.

The markets loved Meta last week with the stock seeing a 20% rise in a single day 🤯. Zuckerberg shared during an earnings call that the company plans to invest heavily in its virtual reality and AI products.

DEVELOPMENTS
AI Developments in the past week

• Volkswagen has set up an AI lab. The car manufacturer shared that the lab will serve as a “globally networked competence center and incubator”, identify new product ideas connected with AI, and collaborate with the tech sector in Europe, China, and North America 🚗

• Amazon announces Rufus, a Gen AI-powered conversational shopping experience. Andy Jassy (CEO) shared that Amazon plans to incorporate GenAI across all of its businesses, and it’s expected that the company will share an update on its AI efforts when it reports Q4 earnings on Thursday

• The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) moves to criminalize AI-generated robocalls. If you’re an executive at a company that currently uses robocalls, we just have one question for you - why. 😒 

• 🤗 Hugging Face launched an open source AI Assistant maker to rival Open AI’s custom GPTs

• Mastercard has launched a proprietary GenAI model that can boost fraud detection by up to 300%

• Hong Kong firm scammed out of $25 million. Bringing scams to a whole new level - A finance executive at an MNC was duped into wiring $25 million after being instructed on a video call with the “CFO” and other employees. Turns out the CFO and other employees were all deepfakes 😶‍🌫️

FUNDING
Funding in the past week

• Anomalo, a US-based company that does data quality monitoring for enterprises, raised a $33M series B with participation from SignalFire and Databricks Ventures

• Axyon AI, an Italy-based company that uses AI to help asset managers improve their performance, raised a $4M round led by Montage Ventures

• Krutrim raised a $50M round at a $1B valuation, making it India’s first AI unicorn. The company is building large language models trained on Indian languages in addition to English. The round was led by Matrix Partners

• Norm AI, a US-based regulatory AI company that makes products to support corporate compliance, raised a $11.1M seed round backed by Coatue, Haystack Ventures, and M13 Ventures

• Send AI, an Amsterdam-based company that helps businesses extract and manage data from documents, raised a $2.4M pre-seed round backed by Gradient Ventures (Google’s AI Fund) and Keen Venture Partners

For a list of all the companies that have raised funding in the past 3 months, check out our funding database! The password is EITreaders

If you’d like to share the database with your friends, share this link: https://www.execsintech.com/funding-database

JOBS
Leadership roles on the business side of AI

• Product Manager, Search & AI. Alibaba Group

• Director, Implementation & Support. EliseAI

• Director, Strategic Partnerships GSI. Moveworks

• Director HRBP, Operations. Scale AI

• Director, GenAI. Uber

INDUSTRY AT A GLANCE
The next frontier of drug discovery 💊

AI is being used to dream up new drugs and generate pharma R&D insights by devouring data that would have previously taken teams of scientists decades to comb through. Here’s a few hot companies building exciting therapeutic solutions using AI:

• Aqemia, who just raised a $32.5 million Series A this year, is scaling the drug delivery process by combining quantum-inspired physics and machine learning. Their unique algorithm can predict whether a drug candidate will activate against a therapeutic target 10,000 times faster than the best-in-class competition.

• Unnatural Products is a drug discovery platform that’s using AI to engineer synthetic macrocycles that mimic natural macrocycles. Macrocycles are molecules that are common in nature, and can be successful in binding to a vast number of targets in disease pathways that require a large molecule inside of a cell (which is otherwise difficult to manage for various reasons). Unnatural Products raised a $32 million Series A this year.

• Inductive Bio was in stealth until December of last year, emerging with $4.3 million in seed funding in a round co-led by a16z Bio + Health and Lux Capital. Inductive's platform uses ML and a proprietary database to map the drivers of key small molecule properties to help scientists optimize initial compounds into leads and drug development candidates faster and at much lower cost.

• Genesis Therapeutics closed an oversubscribed $200 million Series B last August, and is also using AI to accelerate and optimize small molecule drug discovery. Using a mix of machine learning, molecular simulation (3D models to simulate binding dynamics), and molecular generation, the Genesis platform can predict a full range of critical chemical properties. Genesis raised $200 million in funding co-led by a16z and an unnamed investor. Interestingly, a16z General Partner Vijay Pande -- who previously spent 16 years as a Stanford professor and chaired Stanford's Biophysics Program -- headed up the lab where Genesis was created.

• Generate Biomedicines is using AI to understand the foundational principles of protein structure and function to generate novel proteins across all protein modalities, including antibodies, peptides, enzymes and cell and gene therapy. The company claims their model can help make proteins truly programmable, and is akin to “learning how to ‘write’ in the mysterious language of proteins”. Generate has raised $693 million to date, including a $273 million Series C last September.

See you next week! If you’ve liked what you’ve read so far, do us a solid and share this with your friends 🌟