Memory Leak — #38
VC Astasia Myers’ perspectives on AI, cloud infrastructure, developer tools, open source, and security. Sign up here.
🚀 Products
The Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.3 Large Language Model (LLM) is an instruct fine-tuned version of the Mistral-7B-v0.3.
Why does this matter? The new version of Mistral 7B has function calling, which is a critical capability that we believe will be increasingly important. In an API call, you can describe functions and have the model intelligently choose to output a JSON object containing arguments to call one or many functions. Function calling can be used to convert natural language into API calls, extract structured data from text, and create assistants that answer questions by calling external APIs.
Firecrawl is an API service that takes a URL, crawls it, and converts it into clean markdown or structured data. Firecrawl crawl all accessible subpages and give you clean data for each. No sitemap required.
Why does this matter? We believe web AI agents will leverage the internet to collect data and complete tasks on behalf of users. Firecrawl is a useful solution to enable that future.
Indexify is an open source data framework featuring a real-time extraction engine and pre-built extraction adapters. Build fast AI applications with reliability and precision, driving smarter decisions from your data.
Why does this matter? Unstructured data is critical for conversational AI and AI agents. Indexify is unique because it supports near real-time (<5 ms) extraction to ensure the data the LLM application depends on is current. While most unstructured data extraction platforms solely focus on PDFs, Indexify enables users to draw information from text, video, audio, and images.
📰 Content
Megadeals Explode Early in the Year as Us Startups Gobble up More $100M+ Rounds
Although venture funding seems to have slowed overall, more and more startups seem to be having an easier time securing really big funding rounds — that seemed to dry up last year — from investors. Rounds of $100 million or more — or megadeals — have exploded this year, as U.S.-based startups have collected 115 such rounds through mid-May, per The Crunchbase Megadeals Board. That is a 58% spike compared to the 73 megadeals raised last year at this time.
Why does this matter? This article highlights that growth investing remains active but there is a focus on high profile companies, a “flight to quality.” While we aren’t back to the 2021 and 2022 levels of $100 million or more round sizes, we are seeing a recovery compared to 2023. The fast majority of megadeals were in biotech and healthcare.
A Landmark Multi-Year Global Partnership With News Corp
OpenAI has inked a deal with News Corp (owner of WSJ, Barron’s, MarketWatch, & more) to integrate its news content into ChatGPT. The agreement could be worth up to $250M, according to the WSJ.
Why does this matter? OpenAI will receive access to current and archived content from News Corp’s major news and information publications. This announcement contrasts the strained relationship OpenAI has with The New York Times, which sued them for unpermitted use of Times articles to train GPT large language models. This partnership also enables OpenAI to have more real-time content compared to being frozen.
AI ‘Agent’ Startup Adept Has Talked to Potential Buyers, Including Meta
The leaders of Adept, a 2-year-old artificial intelligence startup run by former OpenAI and Google AI developers, held talks in recent months about a possible sale or strategic partnership with large tech companies, according to a person with direct knowledge of the conversations. One company Adept spoke to was Facebook owner Meta Platforms, this person said, though an acquisition is unlikely.
Why does this matter? Competition between AI model companies continues to be stiff. Earlier this week, French AI startup H announced its $220M seed round that it will use to build AI agents, “frontier action models to boost the productivity of workers.” It was also rumored that Snowflake was in talks to acquire Reka AI for more than $1B but that talks broke down. We believe in a world of multiple independent, standalone model companies. With the continuous investment in new startups combined with rumored acquisition talks, it is unclear who those will be in three years.
💼 Jobs
⭐️DragonflyDB — React Tech Lead — Dragonfly Cloud
⭐️Chroma — Member of Technical Staff
⭐️Speakeasy — Product Engineer
Views expressed in posts and other content linked on this website or posted to social media and other platforms are my own and are not the views of Felicis Ventures Management Company, LLC. The posts do not constitute investment, legal, tax, or other advice and do not constitute an offer to invest in any security.
