Silicon Valley Heavyweights - Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia, a16z, SV Angel Invest in an AI Creator Startup

Hello 👋

This is The Copilot - we are the AI newsletter that founders, funders, and everyone in between reads.

It is Thursday, June 29, and we have seven fascinating topics to cover.

• 💸 AI Money Flow - Venture Funding Insights

• 🤯 The Impact Number

• ✅ Question of The Week

• 🧐 Weekly Highlights

• 💰 AI Business Opportunity - Identify Fake Reviews

• 🔥 The AI Startup Jobs Hotlist

• 🌶️ Spicy AI Tweets

💸 AI Money Trail - Venture Funding Insights
June 22 - June 28

• Over half a billion dollars has been invested in AI startups for the third consecutive week. That's some serious confidence in the potential of AI!

• 25 out of 62 organizations received first checks - angel, pre-seed, or seed funding.

• Captions AI, a popular AI video creation app with over 3 million users, secured $25 million in Series B funding.

  • Heavyweight Silicon Valley investors - Kleiner, Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz, and SV Angel - participated in the funding round.

  • Watch the demo of the popular AI Eye Contact feature that corrects eye contact in post-production.
    Users are referring to this feature as “mind-blowing,” “a game-changer,” and “magic in a box” 🤯

• Celestial AI bagged $100M in funding to pioneer data transmission through light-based interconnects ⚡️

  • Celestial AI' has built technology that uses light to move data through chips, improving computer performance and power usage, especially for AI tasks.

  • The Engine, the VC firm spun out of MIT, is also an investor in the round led by IAG Capital Partners, Koch Disruptive Technologies, and Temasek’s Xora Innovation fund.

🤯 The Impact Number

$2.4 Million

Average seed or early-stage funding size in AI startups in 2023

I analyzed 611 AI companies that raised and disclosed their seed-stage investment this year.

The median check size is $750,000.

Data source: Crunchbase

✅ Question of The Week

Please vote to see the result in next week’s issue.

Result from the last week’s poll.

🧐 The Highlights

• AI threatens to replace 80% of women's jobs, study finds (Link)

• OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, is facing legal challenges for allegedly using large quantities of personal data in its quest to lead in AI development (Link)

• E-bike riders can now chat with ChatGPT on Urtopia bikes (Link)
  See the demo below 👇

• Baidu announces that its AI model, Ernie 3.5, excels in several key aspects compared to OpenAI’s ChatGPT and GPT-4, marking a milestone in the global AI race (Link)

• Meta targets colossal AI for sharper content recommendations (Link)

• Major publishers like New York Times and News Corp are exploring forming a coalition to address concerns over AI content generation affecting their business (Link)

💰 AI Business Opportunity - Identify Fake Reviews

Problem

• Fake reviews are rampant across e-commerce platforms, and according to the World Economic Forum, fake reviews cost a hefty $152 billion a year toll on the global economy.

• The proliferation of fake reviews hurts businesses and erodes consumer trust, while high returns and easy creation processes incentivize fraudsters.

Solution

• Utilize ChatGPT to quickly build a minimum viable product (MVP) for detecting fake reviews. Initially, you might need minimal to no training to use its natural language processing capabilities.

• Gradual AI Sophistication: As the solution gains traction, invest in developing a more advanced and proprietary AI algorithm, incorporating insights from the MVP and user feedback.

Product or Service

• This could start as a services business where customers can hire the agency to monitor their product reviews using in-house software (ChatGPT in the beginning)

• Over time, this could evolve into a SaaS platform, which can scale to hundreds and thousands of clients.

• In the future, your company can invest in building more sophisticated and fine-tuned models to detect fake reviews.

Business Model

• Start with consulting contracts for tailored services, then transition to a tiered subscription model as the SaaS platform evolves.

Marketing Strategy

• Partner with e-commerce giants, review platforms, and regulatory bodies to position the product as an industry standard.

• Highlight case studies of businesses that successfully used the service to build credibility and attract new clients.

🔥 The Remote AI Jobs Hotlist

• Product & Marketing

  • SparkCognition - Director of Product (Apply)

  • Netomi AI - Director of Product (Apply)

  • Stripe - Staff Product Manager (Apply)

  • Minerva AI - Product Marketing Manager (Apply)

  • Quora - Product Marketing Lead (Apply)

• Tech & Engineering

  • ClickUp - Senior NLP Engineer (Apply)

  • Stripe - Machine Learning Engineer, Risk (Apply)

  • Signify Technology - ML/LLM Engineer (Apply)

  • Figma - Machine Learning Researcher (Apply)

  • Cardinal Financial Company - Applied AI Engineer (Apply)

• Business & Operations

  • Mastercard - Director, AI Governance (Apply)

  • EWOR - Entrepreneur & Founder (Apply)

  • Raptive - Senior Manager, AI Industry Analysis (Apply)

  • Varicent - Generative AI Solutions Consultant (Apply)

🌶️ Spicy AI Tweets

That’s it for this week. See you again next week.

-Salil