Enterprise Weekly #481: Enterprise Adoption of AI Infra, Welcoming Goodfire, and More
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This week, Danny spoke to a group of founders and enterprise IT executives on the current state of building and selling AI. His main takeaway: the startup landscape is fiercely competitive and the tide is rapidly shifting beneath us.
While AI remains the darling of VC dollars and high valuations, many are wondering when the chicken will come home to roost, and if corporate budgets / vendor revenue will eventually align with the huge investments big tech is making in AI infrastructure.
Sequoia recently crunched the numbers and found that big tech’s annual capital expenditures surged from $138B to $229B year-over-year, driven by massive investments in AI data centers to continue developing more performant models.
As AI research institutions like OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta and more race to procure billion-dollar clusters of GPUs to win the model wars, enterprise AI adoption isn’t so straightforward. Some organizations like Klarna and Walmart are augmenting their workforce and already seeing massive productivity gains. While others are still figuring out the build vs. buy tradeoffs, learning best practices for data security, and setting up AI centers of excellence just to learn about the risks of AI.
Meanwhile, on the Work-Bench side, we’re excited to announce our latest investment in Goodfire’s $7M Seed round along with Lightspeed Venture Partners and Menlo Ventures. 🔥 Founder Eric Ho was co-founder of our Work-Bench portfolio company RippleMatch, and is now embarking on a bold new mission that empowers developers to understand, edit, and debug AI models at scale, ensuring safer and more reliable systems. Check out their open Founding Software Engineer role!
Lastly, Enterprise Weekly will be on a hiatus for the next 2 weeks, while many of our readers are on much deserved vacations. See you in September! 🍂
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🌟 Company of the Week 🌟
Profound raises $3.5M led by Khosla Ventures, South Park Commons, and Others
Sales / Marketing • Seed • New York, NY
Co-Founders: James Cadwallader (CEO), Dylan Babbs (CTO)
FuseBase raises $700K led by AltaIR Capital, Yellow Rocks, and Others
Collaboration / Productivity • Seed • Cleveland, OH
Cosine raises $2.5M led by SOMA and Uphonest
Infrastructure / Dev Tools • Seed • San Francisco, CA
Voiceline raises $2.6M led by Venture Stars and Scalehouse Capital
Sales / Marketing • Seed • Munich, Germany
Guardoc Health raises $3M led by Pitango
Future of Work • Seed • Tel Aviv, Israel
Heatmap raises $4M led by Vine Ventures
Sales / Marketing • Seed • New York, NY
Definity raises $4.5M led by StageOne Ventures
Data / AI / Machine Learning • Seed • Chicago, IL
Ragie raises $5.5M led by Craft Ventures, Chapter One and Others
Data / AI / Machine Learning • Seed • San Francisco, CA
Conduit raises $6M led by Helios Digital Ventures
Future of Work • Seed • Remote
Trumpet raises $6.4M led by AlbionVC
Sales / Marketing • Seed • London, UK
Goodfire raises $7M led by Lightspeed Venture Partners
Data / AI / Machine Learning • Seed • San Francisco, CA
MemGPT raises $10M led by Felicis Ventures
Data / AI / Machine Learning • Seed • Berkeley, CA
CodeRabbit raises $16M led by CRV
Infrastructure / Dev Tools • Series A • Walnut Creek, CA
Encord raises $30M led by Next47
Data / AI / Machine Learning • Series B • San Francisco, CA
Anysphere raises $60M led by Andreessen Horowitz and Thrive Capital
Infrastructure / Dev Tools • Series A • Buffalo, NY
Contextual AI raises $80M led by Greycroft
Data / AI / Machine Learning • Series A • Mountain View, CA
DevRev raises $100.8M led by Khosla Ventures, Mayfield Fund and Others
Infrastructure / Dev Tools • Series A • Palo Alto, CA
Kiteworks raises $456M led by Insight Partners and Sixth Street Growth
Risk / Security • Venture • San Mateo, CA
HPE acquires Morpheus Data for an Undisclosed Amount
Infrastructure / Dev Tools • Acquisition • Greenwood Village, CO