AI Companies That Raised Over $100M+ | Pt. 5

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0:46Plus, 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 top companies who raised over$100 million in the past year with their AI technology. So we're going to continue the list. Before we do, Jamie, why don't you tell them about our school community? Yeah, every single week Jamie and I record a bonus piece of content that we post over on our school community.

1:23so we're breaking down all of the ai tools tactics and techniques we're using to grow and scale our businesses and we show you how to do that we show you a whole bunch of different side hustles that we're doing how you can do them to make money with ai or to grow and scale your business with ai so there's a couple things there you get new ideas and you get ideas for inside of your company we are basically sharing everything that we don't share publicly how much money we make how much revenue it's generating what it costs to use a lot of these tools why i'm spending over a thousand a month on 11 labs credits, which sounds like insanity, but has some amazing ROI.

1:57If you're interested in any of that, um, go check it out. It's$19 a month. It's a Christmas discount right now. So it's$19 a month for the Christmas discount. The price goes up in the future. We've had it much higher in the past. It's been a hundred dollars a month in the past. Um, so it's discounted right now. And if you get it at$19 a month, it won't ever be raised on you. So you go lock it in. Um, thanks so much for, uh, yeah, we'd love to have you in the community. It'd be awesome. Let's talk about the top companies that have raised over$100 million this year, which is phenomenal. So like Jamie mentioned, the first one we want to talk about is called Sandbox AQ.

2:32So they just closed a Series E where they had the company valued at$5.7 billion. They raised$450 million. That is a lot of money. They got the money from NVIDIA, Google, Bridgewater Associates, which is, they also had DeRoglio, or sorry, Ray Dalio that invested in this. So a lot of big players, a ton of money. Sandbox AQ was one of the, I think, one of the bigger ones that happened in April. And it's funny because it's like not one that is super known and, you know, the most well-known one. But basically, it is a partner or basically they partner with a lot of companies. One thing that they're highlighting on their website is that they have partnered with the DAO for AI and post-quantum cryptography defense.

3:23So if you're wondering what they do, they do post-quantum cryptography defense. Basically, once quantum takes over and quantum computers can crack all of your cryptography, what are you going to do? You're going to go to Sandbox AQ and you're going to work with them and they'll make it So that even the quantum computers can't crack into your secure environments, into your encrypted, you know, messages. This is really important for everything in finance. Also, they're working with Baran's Sovereign Fund. They signed a deal to speed up drug discovery with them. So it feels like they're kind of like all over the place doing a whole bunch of big things, big companies and big people.

4:03But it's not like a company that I think most people, if you like, were like, hey, do you know Sandbox AQ? I don't think most people recognize that name unless, of course, you're Baran's Sovereign Fund or you're the DAW and you're worried about cryptography. So interesting company. Yeah, I've never heard of them. But yeah, that sounds like they do some really important work over there. So pretty cool. Definitely want to keep your eye on. And next is Runway, which we've talked about quite a bit on this podcast. But they are a, you know, AI video generation company. A really good one at that. They raised$308 million in April in their Series D round that valued the company at$3 billion.

4:41So that was led by General Atlantic, SoftBank, NVIDIA, and Fidelity. So Runway is really just a great program. They kind of fell off, at least in the news, a little bit for a while because OpenAI released Sora and just really kind of competed in a big way. But Runway is, I feel like, more cinematic. It could definitely be more used in Hollywood. Just with their color grading, lighting, things like that, they are doing things a little bit differently than OpenAI and Sora. Just a really, really great company. So definitely one to keep in the back of your head. Yeah, it's interesting. If you go to their website, they'll highlight a bunch of people that they have worked with.

5:23They've worked with Under Armour to power some of their TV commercials. So the footage from their TV commercials is AI generated. They've also worked with the History Channel. to help with some of their footage. Sometimes it's really hard to get footage from maybe something that happened a long time ago in history. There is no video of it. And so you, I mean, you could go use special effects, but using one of these AI models is the best way to get some of that. And then they also worked with the TV show that is on Amazon called House of David. That TV show used it to help create scenes inside of their TV show.

5:59So they're helping with a lot of different places. Like you mentioned, Jamie, it's like less like, you know, Sora where everyone wants to just create little like goofy videos. And it's like being used by big Hollywood firms and big companies. So no shocker that they were able to raise$308 million at a$3 billion valuation. And of course, they had NVIDIA who put some money in there because NVIDIA sells them chips and wants their money back. And they know that if they give it to Runway, they're going to get their money back. So great company. All right. Moving on to May. A huge company that I have talked to before is called Snorkel AI.

6:35I actually first met Snorkel AI at I think a trade show, an AI trade show a couple years ago. Big company. They're a data labeling startup. They raised$100 million. It was their Series D that valued them at$1.3 billion. And they had Lightspeed Ventures, Greylock, Prosperity 7 Ventures, a bunch of big players that were investing into this. One thing that's interesting about Snorkel AI to me is some of these data labeling companies are making insane amounts of money. You saw Scale AI get acquired for a multi-billion dollar deal when Zuckerberg acquired their company that he took their CEO, made him as head of AI over at Meta.

7:16So Snorkel AI feels like it's kind of filling in some of the gaps because after that happened, OpenAI and Google both were like, we're not going to use ScaleAI anymore because Meta now controls it and we don't want to give our money to Meta, even though ScaleAI has a ton of really good labeled data. So I guess they're lost, perhaps. I don't know. But in any case, StorkelAI is making a lot of money here doing something very similar. Very cool. Very cool. The next one on the list is called LMA Arena, LMA Arena, a popular community-driven benchmarking tool for AI models. So they raised$100 million in a seed round that valued the company at$600 million.

7:54So what's crazy to me about this is that it's just a benchmarking tool to like kind of measure parameters and the power of the AI, but they themselves raised$100 million. So Jaden, like how in this world, how does that happen? Or like what's the value there in making good AI benchmarking tools? So the thing that I love about LM Arena is basically anytime a new AI model gets released, they always quote how they did on Ella Marina. It's basically the number one benchmark. And the reason why it's the number one benchmark is because what you do on it is you can you just use it like you'd use ChatGPT.

8:34You, you know, you tell, say, tell me a joke. And it's going to give you two responses side by side. And you just pick which one you like better. And so you get to use AI for free. That's super nice. And then you get two responses. So you get double whatever and you pick which one's better. But then what happens is they publish these reports where like they don't tell you which AI model is which one. You just tell them which one you like better. And so anytime OpenAI or Anthropic or Google Gemini are coming out with a new model, they'll release the new model incognito to LM Arena. So no one knows what it is.

9:08And if that model does really good on LM Arena, then the AI model company knows that they should launch it. So when you see like, oh, there's a new, and they give them code names, right? It's like, oh i think before the you know like before nano banana got released they had like a code name banana model that was like doing really good on ella marina and everyone's like oh my gosh why is the banana model crushing everybody what is this mystical banana model and it's like turns out it's nano banana and so this this basically happens where there's like these a new crazy incognito model will pop up on ella marina everybody's like wow why is it so much better than everything else the reason why i like this versus other benchmarks people will be like oh but like on a software engineering benchmark, OpenAI is better than like Anthropic.

9:50But like if you ask software engineers, they always would prefer Anthropic. I like this because it's a blind test. And sometimes you can kind of game the benchmarks where you're like, yeah, we answered like X amount of questions right on this benchmark. And sometimes it's like you can train your model on the questions in the benchmark. There's sneaky ways, OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, all of them are guilty of this. The one that feels like you cannot game it is LM Arena because it's basically you get two responses side by side you pick which one you prefer and all of a sudden like that's going to be the top model on LM arena and if you can make a new model put it out and all of a sudden it's it's being ranked as like the best responses it's just a blind test it's super super trusted and safe and people are actually picking that so long rant over LM arena is awesome well hey yeah thanks for explaining that that clears it up a lot for me so thank you hey and hey if you listened to this episode and you got any value out of it, we would love a rating or review wherever you are listening or watching.

10:51We really appreciate those and they help us reach more people. And again, check out the AI Hustle School community if you want to get an unfair advantage in growing your business or making money using AI. Thanks for listening and we'll see you next time. What's up, baby? It's Bretzky and I know you're in Illinois. Get your face out of the deep dish pizza for a second, okay? SpinQuest.com has slots and table games that are absolutely free with the ability to win real cash prizes straight to your bank account. Head over there right now because they're selling$30 coin packages for only$10. SpinQuest.com.

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