Entrepreneur Ivan Crewkov from Siberia discovered the immense potential of AI in education after a failed attempt in the smart speaker market, inspired by his daughter's experience learning English. His children's English education AI company Buddy.ai recently raised $11 million in seed funding, led by BITKRAFT Ventures, as its AI technology and business model focused on addressing children's English learning challenges gained recognition from investors. Crewkov's entrepreneurial journey has been quite dramatic.

Enterprise AI leader Glean raised over $260 million in its latest Series E financing round, with the company's valuation reaching $4.6 billion, doubling from $2.2 billion six months ago. This round was co-led by Altimeter and DST Global, with participation from several investment firms including Craft Ventures, Sapphire Ventures, and SoftBank Vision Fund 2. Along with the financing, Glean launched Work AI.

Venture capitalist Vinod Khosla's remarks have sparked heated debate, claiming that '100% of AI unicorns are built on OpenAI's API.' This statement has been met with opposition from netizens, who pointed out that multiple AI models, including Claude, Anthropic, Mistral, and Meta's Llama, do not entirely rely on OpenAI technology. In the discussion, some users drew an analogy to the electric vehicle market, emphasizing that different AI unicorns may have their own unique technologies.

Wuwen Chip Quasar, an AI startup established just over a year ago, recently secured nearly 500 million in Series A financing, bringing its total financing to over 1 billion, making it the king of financing in the AI infrastructure sector. Its shareholders include state-owned assets, local funds, and notable venture capital institutions such as Shunwei Capital and Dacheng Financial Intelligence. One of the founders, Wang Yu, is the head of the Department of Electronics at Tsinghua University, and many team members have Tsinghua backgrounds with rich research experience. In 2016, DeepInsight Technology, incubated by Tsinghua NICS-EFC Laboratory, was acquired by Xilinx for 300 million.

AI programming sector experiences significant funding surge as Codeium, a new unicorn, secures $150 million at a valuation exceeding $1.25 billion. Led by General Catalyst with participation from Kleiner Perkins and Greenoaks, this round highlights market optimism for AI programming technology. Codeium's platform leverages its proprietary code models to simplify software development and enhance developer productivity. The funds will accelerate pr....

Domestic AI chip design company Suiyuan Technology has initiated the counseling process for its A-share listing, officially starting its IPO. Established in 2018, Suiyuan Technology focuses on the development of cloud computing products in the AI field, including AI acceleration cards, intelligent computing clusters, and related software and platforms. The company's founders, Zhao Lidong and Zhang Yalin, both possess strong technical backgrounds. One year after its establishment, Suiyuan Technology launched its first-generation AI training chip, SuiSi 1.0, and has now developed to the second generation, SuiSi 2.0, while also developing multiple AI inference chips. In just six years, the company has completed ten rounds of financing, totaling nearly 7 billion RMB.

World Labs, a startup founded by Stanford University AI professor Fei-Fei Li, has completed two rounds of funding in two months, reaching a valuation of over $1 billion and becoming a 'unicorn' company. The latest funding round was led by NEA, with a significant increase in valuation compared to the first round in April. World Labs is dedicated to developing AI models that can accurately estimate the three-dimensional physical properties of real-world objects and environments, aiming for detailed digital replication without the need for large-scale data collection, and is focused on addressing the scarcity of 3D data. The company's business model has not been validated by the market.

Recently, some media reported that Tencent participated in the $300 million financing of the Chinese artificial intelligence unicorn company Yue Zhi An Mian Technology Co., Ltd., but Yue Zhi An Mian declined to comment. Previously, Yue Zhi An Mian's valuation reached $3 billion in May, making it a leader among large model startups.

Renowned AI expert Fei-Fei Li has established a startup called "World Labs" within just four months, which has quickly become a unicorn in the AI field. According to two insiders, World Labs is currently valued at over $1 billion and has completed two rounds of funding.Image source note: The image is generated by AI, provided by the image licensing service Midjourney The investment lineup is strong, including the famous venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (also known as a16z) and the AI-foc

Alibaba has led an investment of at least $600 million in Minimax, creating a big model unicorn. Minimax, founded in December 2021, is an AI startup claiming to be all-in on AGI. Minimax has developed foundational model architectures for three modalities: text-to-visual, text-to-speech, and text-to-text. Glow and Inspo are Minimax's early products, respectively focusing on virtual chat and generative dialogue. Minimax has attracted significant attention from investors, receiving support from multiple investment firms.

In 2023, 23 new unicorn companies related to large models emerged, with a peak valuation of $184 billion. A significant proportion of these new unicorns are startups focusing on large language models and video generation. Among the new unicorns in China, 6 come from various sectors including large language models, video generation, and robotics. Major investors include leading tech companies such as Google, Microsoft, Tencent, and Alibaba. 2023 is considered a pivotal year for the emergence of unicorns.

Stability AI has recently faced significant financial pressure and is seeking to sell the company, with key investors demanding the CEO's resignation. Despite frequent product updates, the departure of 15 executives within 9 months has raised concerns. Founded in 2019 and achieving unicorn status in 2022 with the launch of the Stable Diffusion model, CEO Emad Mostaque has clarified the rumors of a sale, but internal management issues continue to raise concerns. Meanwhile, the company has secured $50 million in new funding but faces challenges both inside and outside.

UK AI chip company Graphcore has laid off most of its employees in China and stopped sales in the country due to increased U.S. export controls. Once a popular startup in Europe, Graphcore is now facing losses, order losses, and funding difficulties. The company's CEO pointed out that the Chinese market accounted for 20% to 25% of its revenue, and the layoff decision will impact its development in China. Graphcore is struggling with bad luck, management mistakes, and software issues, leading to unclear business direction and low morale. The UK government has not included Graphcore in its domestic support.

["Vietnam's tech unicorn VNG plans to launch a ChatGPT-style AI service to provide a customized experience for Vietnamese users.", "Backed by Tencent and Alibaba's Ant Group, VNG is introducing translation features and will soon launch generative AI capabilities.", "After delaying its Nasdaq IPO, VNG is seeking new 'cash cows' to support its listing plans in the United States.", "Headquartered in Ho Chi Minh City, VNG plans to test strict regulations on cross-border finance in Vietnam while pursuing an IPO in the U.S."]

Zhipu AI is reported to be seeking a new round of financing with a valuation of 20 billion RMB, making it one of the highest-valued companies in the domestic large model sector. It has launched the third-generation base model ChatGLM3, which competes with GPT-4V, showcasing significantly upgraded performance and impressive rankings. Investors include major companies such as Alibaba, Meituan, Tencent, and Xiaomi, as it enters the later stages of Series B financing, aiming to raise over 2.5 billion RMB. ChatGLM3 enhances performance and reasoning capabilities, introducing a new code interpreter feature that has garnered widespread attention. Zhipu AI demonstrates its high valuation and continuous financing success.

Imbue is an artificial intelligence startup founded by a Chinese female entrepreneur. The company is valued at over $1 billion, becoming a unicorn in Silicon Valley. The large model trained by Imbue has over 100 billion parameters, creating codable AI agents. Founder Qiu Kanjun was an early member of Dropbox and is skilled in building communities. Imbue's goal of creating AI agents is as noble as that of researchers at Xerox PARC building personal computers half a century ago.

Talkie is an AI chatbot and card game product that has recently seen a rapid rise in rankings in the non-gaming category of the US App Store. Silicon Valley VCs believe that generative AI applications in the B2B sector require high-quality industry data, diverse application scenarios, and strong market demand. Industries like healthcare and finance possess high-quality data and numerous application scenarios, making them fertile ground for generative AI. The quality of data is more important than quantity; specialized models for industries can be trained without massive data sets. Foreign education companies are exploring various applications of ChatGPT in the education sector.

Salesforce leads the latest financing round for Hugging Face, valuing the company at over $4 billion. Hugging Face is one of the highest-valued companies in the generative AI boom. Salesforce is strategically defending and attacking through investments in AI startups.

1. Hugging Face has secured $200 million in Series D funding led by Salesforce Ventures, with a valuation of $4 billion. 2. Hugging Face has 15,000 user companies and 3,000 enterprise-level paying customers. This year, the ARR is expected to be around $40 million. 3. Investor Salesforce may view Hugging Face as a potential acquisition target in the future. Collaboration with Salesforce could bring AI opportunities to the enterprise service sector.