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Funding blitz

Startup: Replicate - Newly emerged from stealth, Replicate offers open source models and tools to make deploying machine learning models in the cloud easier.

Replicate was founded by former Spotify ML engineer Andreas Jansson and Ben Firshman, who previously served as director of product management at Docker.

The pair want to make fine-tuning of generative AI models like ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion as easily as “forking something on GitHub.”

Latest funding: $17.8 million, of which $12.5 million comes from series A

Lead investor: Andreessen Horowitz

Other investors: Y Combinator, Sequoia, Figma CEO Dylan Field and Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch

Funding plans: Replicate plans on building out its work to keep pace with the current explosion of generative AI models being released.

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Startup: Veridion (formerly Soleadify) - Romanian startup developing data tools for business decision-making

Latest funding: $6 million, seed round

Lead investors: OTB Ventures, Underline Ventures, LAUNCHub Ventures

Other investors: Day One Capital, Gapminder VC

Funding plans: The Romanian company is eyeing a move to the U.S. and plans to open an office in New York by the end of the year.

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Startup: HireLogic - Based in Reston, Virginia, HireLogic offers AI-powered recruitment tools.

Latest funding: $6 million, series A

Lead investor: Joseph P. Landy, former partner and co-CEO of Warburg Pincus

Funding plans: The investment will be used to advance the capabilities of HireLogic’s conversational analytics platform, expand go-to-market activities and meet the demands of the firm’s growing customer base.

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Startup: Kaito - Seattle-based AI-powered search and recommendation engine for crypto and digital assets

Latest funding: $5.3 million, seed round

Lead investor: Dragonfly, the crypto venture fund

Other investors: Sequoia Capital China, Jane Street, Mirana Ventures, Folius Ventures and Alpha Lab Capital

Funding plans: Kaito wants to scale its team and product. Founder and CEO Yu Hu told TechCrunch that the company was in talks with OpenAI and Binance for further rounds.

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Startup: Spoke.ai - App designed to make communications on Slack more efficient.

Latest funding: $2.1 million, pre-seed funding round

Investors: byFounders, Possible Ventures

Funding plans: Alongside its raise, Spoke also announced the open beta launch of its app for Slack.