Enterprise Weekly #482: All Eyes on AI...Data Centers, Enterprise Offerings, and More
Work-Bench is an enterprise software VC firm leading Seed rounds. If you are or know anyone thinking about founding an enterprise software startup — we’d love to meet! Please reach out to chat. 📩
We’re back from Labor Day weekend and it wouldn’t be a return to Enterprise Weekly without AI news:
NVIDIA beat earnings estimates last week, but still triggered a broader “stock market freakout” thanks to continued concerns over AI’s ROI equation. The rising costs of building data centers capable of training next-gen LLMs are staggering, with estimates that $2T will be spent on these projects worldwide in the next five years. With ROI expected no earlier than late 2025 or early 2026, deep-pocketed investors like Blackstone are aggressively investing in the sector to capitalize on the AI boom.
➡️ If you want to chat more about data centers, check out our NYC Data Center Roundtable hosted by Danny Chesley and Zac Smith on October 2nd.
“Anthropic is coming for the enterprise,” with its launch of Claude Enterprise, providing companies with secure access to its Claude 3 LLM family with a 500,000 token context window, more than 2x the consumer versions of Claude. Though OpenAI has a strong presence in the enterprise market, Anthropic hopes to stand out with its emphasis on safety, explainability, and collaboration.
Safe Superintelligence (SSI for short) announced $1B+ in funding. Co-founder Ilya Sutskever has had a busy year, going from OpenAI co-founder and Chief Scientist to being a key participant in the alleged coup of Sam Altman to now starting his own for-profit research lab. SSI's mission is pretty clear in its name with a blunt rebuke of all things OpenAI.
What does this all mean? We don’t anticipate AI investment will stop anytime soon. Big-tech, institutional investors, and startups will all continue to invest heavily…until there’s reason not to.
🗓️ Join more Work-Bench events:
September 10: ML Engineering Happy Hour co-hosted with Runhouse **remaining seats are reserved for ML practitioners & builders only
September 25th: NYC SaaS Happy Hour to meet and connect with founders & operators from NYC’s next gen enterprise startups
📚 Read more news:
Business Insider: Frontier Content: How to Survive Online In The Age of AI
Crunchbase: IPO Market Will End 2024 On A Low Note
TechCrunch: a16z Shutters Its Miami Office After Two Years
📚 Read more (th)reads:
Company: ShiftRx
Role: Founding Engineer
Technology: AI Healthcare Staffing Platform
Funding: $3.5M from Work-Bench, Inflect Health, Tau, and Opal Ventures
🌟 Company of the Week 🌟
Root Signals raises $2.8M led by Angular Ventures
Data / AI / Machine Learning • Seed • Palo Alto, CA
Founder: Dr. Ari Heljakka (CEO)
Steerlab raised $1.9M led by Dreamcraft VC
Sales / Marketing • Pre-Seed • Paris, France
Paradigm raises $2M led by Y Combinator, Soma Capital, and Pioneer Fund
Collaboration / Productivity • Seed • San Francisco, CA
Fastn raises $2.6M led by LiveOak Ventures and Antler
Infrastructure / Dev Tools • Seed • Austin, TX
Agree raises $3M led by Better Tomorrow Ventures
Future of Work • Pre-Seed • San Francisco, CA
Champion raises $3.3M led by Flyover Capital
Sales / Marketing • Seed • Indianapolis, IN
Blitzy raises $4.4M led by Bessemer Venture Partners, Flybridge, and Others
Data / AI / Machine Learning • Seed • Boston, MA
Portex raises $$6.3M led by Footwork
Future of Work • Seed • Hayward, CA
Acuvity raises $9M led by Foundation Capital
Risk / Security • Seed • Sunnyvale, CA
Revefi raises $20M led by Icon Ventures
Data / AI / Machine Learning • Series A • Seattle, WA
nOps raises $30M led by Headlight Partners
Infrastructure / Dev Tools • Series A • San Francisco, CA
You.com raises $50M led by Georgian
Collaboration / Productivity • Series B • Palo Alto, CA
Laravel raises $57M led by Accel
Infrastructure / Dev Tools • Series A • Arkansas City, AR
Oyster raises $59M led by Silver Lake Waterman
HR Tech • Series D • Charlotte, NC
Cortex raises $60M led by Scale Venture Partners
Infrastructure / Dev Tools • Series C • San Francisco, CA
Safe Superintelligence raises $1B led by Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia, and Others
Data / AI / Machine Learning • Venture • Palo Alto, CA
Salesforce acquires Own Company for $1.9B
Risk / Security • Acquisition • Englewood, NJ
Paylocity acquires Airbase for $325M
HR Tech • Acquisition • San Francisco, CA
Salesforce acquires Tenyx for an Undisclosed Amount
Data / AI / Machine Learning • Acquisition • Los Altos, CA