AI Companies That Raised Over $100M+ | Pt. 4

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0:41Because Progressive offers discounts for paying in full, owning a home, and more. Plus, you can count on their great customer service to help when you need it, so your dollar goes a long way. Visit Progressive.com to see if you could save on car insurance. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates, potential savings will vary, not available in all states or situations. Welcome back to the podcast. Today, we are continuing our list of companies in 2025 who have raised over$100 million. And there's a bunch of them. We're doing this so you guys can stay informed as to the top AI companies, kind of get just an overview of where the industry is going and some of the top players.

1:19So let's dive right in. Before we do, Jamie, why don't you tell them about our school community? Yeah. So every single week, Jamie and I cover a new tool technique strategy that we're currently using in our businesses to grow and scale them using AI. Recently, we've done a number of episodes on becoming an AI consultant, how much I'm personally charging per hour. You get the actual numbers. I don't publish this anywhere because the number is growing. But we cover that in a recent video talking about how to land clients as an AI consultant, how much you can charge, the types of things that you should cover in those calls, and how to structure that.

1:53So if you're interested in becoming an AI consultant in your industry and wonder how to get started with that, it is very lucrative. Go check out the AI Hustle School Community among a hundred other videos detailing tools, strategies, techniques for growing and scaling your business using AI. It's$19 a month. We have a holiday Christmas discount right now. If you want to get the Christmas discount and lock in$19 a month, it won't be raised on you in the future when the price goes up, but you can get that discount if you use it now. The link is in the description. All right, let's talk about the first company here, which is Reflection AI.

2:27They're trying to build a super intelligent, autonomous system. We'll get into more of what that means. Jamie, why don't you tell us about how much they raised and who they got money from? Yeah, so they raised$130 million in their Series A round. That values their company at$580 million, but it's only a one-year-old company. So that's pretty impressive. The round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and CRV. But again, that whole description is a little bit vague, if you will. I would love to hear more about what they do. I suspect some of these companies on this list maybe are trying to get government contracts.

3:08That's the one thing it never says when we're talking about these companies raising over$100 million is who's getting the government contracts and why. But have you heard at all about what this company does? Reflection. This is an interesting one. So basically, it's just a research lab. They don't have any product that has come out yet. If you go to their website, it's very blank. It basically has a picture of two people smiling, looking at a computer. And the only thing that is on their homepage, it says building frontier, open intelligence, we're making frontier open intelligence and making it accessible to all.

3:39Then you can go look at their research and stuff. But basically, this is a research lab. And this what's what's interesting is, there's a number of other players that are doing the same thing. You have Ilya Seskova with super state intelligence, who's raised a billion dollars you have Miriam Marati with um I think thinking human labs am I I think that's right yeah she has she's also machine labs oh my gosh why can't I think of Miriam thinking machine yeah yeah thinking machine thank you oh my gosh um so so we have like a bunch of these labs that have no product they're working on specific things and uh reflection.ai is one of them now they're obviously very talented they've raised a lot of money and they haven't raised it from random people It's from like Lightspeed and CRV.

4:20So they're one years old. They've been able to raise$130 million. They have some exciting stuff in the pipe, but it hasn't been released yet. So we're all holding our breath to see when this comes out. They raised this money back in March and we have yet to see the product come out. So will they release something maybe this March on their one year anniversary? Time will tell. But it's interesting to see that some of these research funds or some of these research organizations are also raising massive amounts of money without a clear product that's open. They're sort of still in stealth. So their investors probably know, but we just don't know.

4:52Very interesting. Anyways, next on the list is a coding startup called Turing. They closed the Series E round on March 7 that valued the startup at$2.2 billion. So in that round, they raised$111 million. So led by Kazana Nacional with participation from Westbridge Capital, and Sozo Ventures among others. So another really interesting industry that we haven't really covered yet in this list and that is the coding industry under AI. So Jayden, have you heard about Turing at all or are they partnered with AI? This is interesting. Yeah, I think I covered this on my show AI Chat back in March, but essentially what they're doing is they are helping to improve the accuracy of LLMs and apps that are built on top of them.

5:45So it's kind of like an accuracy detection or checker that you can run. If you have, you know, ChatGPT giving you a response, this will check it for accuracy. They do this in an interesting way. They have a whole bunch of engineers that contribute code to AI projects. And they're also helping build LLMs for OpenAI and a bunch of other players. So it's like they have contracts with OpenAI and some of these other major players to help improve the quality of the output from the LLM. because of that, they actually have$300 million in annual recurring revenue back in March. I'm sure it's higher today.

6:18So like, you know, they're working as a contractor as a company that works for like OpenAI to make the models better. They have a very specific niche kind of expertise. And someone like OpenAI or Gemini or Anthropic, it's like, look, if we can make your model 10, 20, 30 % better, would you pay us$100 million? And in most cases, the answer is yes. And so yeah, they have$100 million in annual recurring revenue. They just secured$11 million, which put them at a$2.2 billion valuation. And I think the last round that they did had them priced at$167 million. So that means they're growing really fast.

6:57They're very profitable. And I think today they work with 4 million coders around the world. So when they say they have an army of coders that are contributing code and helping make these models better, they literally have an army of code or 4 million is pretty impressive crazy crazy well hey the next one we have actually is a defense company that i i was saying who get who gets the government contracts shield ai and ai defense tech startup raised 240 million dollars in their series f round that closed on march 6th so uh the round is led by uh l3 harris technologies and hanwa aerospace in participation in participation from Andreessen Horowitz and the U.S.

7:40Innovation Technology Fund, among others. So their company is now valued at$5.3 billion. But when you talk about defense and AI, I feel like there's got to be a crazy amount of money and also opportunity for government contracts. I'd like to learn more about that one as well as the medical discovery industries. But Shield AI, definitely one to keep your eye on yes and i want to give you a couple examples of things that they've worked on because this is a pretty interesting company they said shield ai enabled the x62 vista to fly autonomously fly and perform tactical maneuvers against human pilots so that's one thing that they do another thing um when it came to general atomics aeronautical they said hive minds successfully flew an mq20 avenger leveraging some autonomy government reference architecture compliant interfaces um one other thing they did is it said shield ai conducted dual ship autonomy tests using kratos mqm 178 fire jet drones so yeah they are in defense they're working directly with well what's interesting is i think they're working directly with um like like hardware that already exists like fighter jets or other things that already exist and they're putting their technology into them so in the case of you know like the x62 vista they autonomously flew that and they were you know testing tactical maneuvers against human pilots with an ai flying the flying it so it's very very interesting obviously this is worth a lot of money if you can get humans out of defense out of flying um saves lives and i mean probably takes lives it's all the giant it's i guess it's all the military industrial complex.

9:24So I don't know how, uh, how noble a hundred percent it is, but I mean, if China's attacking me, I want shield AI to fly against them to protect me. So it's a, it is a wild world. All right. Um, another one that's really interesting is of course, we're, we'll, we'll end this episode on one of the other big players that is no shock to anyone, and that is Anthropic, right? This is one of the biggest investor, you know, companies that raised the most money this year after OpenAI. They raised$3.5 billion in their Series E. That round valued them at$61 billion. They announced it in March. It was led by Lightspeed.

10:06I think I've already covered, we've already covered the story, how Lightspeed put the money in, I basically think is because they wanted Anthropic's logo on their website. So they gave them a billion dollars in this. Actually, you know what? That was even more recent in September. They put more in. So Lightspeed's been putting money into Anthropic for a long time. The logo is strong on Lightspeed's website. And I mean, it's no shocker. They're growing very fast. They also had Salesforce Ventures, Menlo Ventures, General Catalyst. All of those were putting money into Anthropic. We don't need to do that much of a, I guess, a summary on what the heck Anthropic does.

10:38It owns Claude, which is the number one coding AI tool that all developers love. They have Cloud Code, which we use over at AIbox.ai. My startup lets you test all the different AI models against each other. Cloud Code basically does all of our coding for us. Our developers use it for everything and saves us a ton of time and money. And Anthropic is the company behind that. So an amazing company for sure. Listen, thank you so much for tuning into the podcast today. If you learned about any new companies you hadn't heard of before, about any of the use cases that seem interesting in AI and defense and other areas, make sure to leave a rating and review on the podcast.

11:14It helps our show out a ton to get found by more amazing people like yourself. And as always, make sure to go check out the AI Hustle School community. We'll leave a link in the description to that. What's up, Illinois? It's Bluff here, and I've got something better than footlong hot dogs and deep dish pizza. It's spinquest.com, America's newest social casino with over a thousand games available for you to play from the comfort of your own home. With instant cash prize redemptions and new users can take advantage of a$30 coin package for only$10. So what are you doing? Quit wasting time and sign up today!

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