AI Startup Roundup: An OpenAI Enterprise Rival Raises $100 Million

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Funding News

Typeface

San Francisco-based Typeface has developed a generative AI platform for enterprise customers. The platform can be used to develop brand content for customer interactions. It pledges to customize the content to a company’s brand, keeps data private and works with other apps. It has plagiarism and authenticity checkers as well.

It describes itself as “the only generative AI platform that delivers brand-specific content at remarkable speeds without compromising data security.”

The startup recently unveiled an Image Studio for high-resolution product photography and video-to-text conversion.

Typeface also recently announced partnerships with Salesforce and Google Cloud. Salesforce Marketing GPT, Google Cloud, and Google Workspace customers will now gain access to Typeface's tech within their existing workflows.

Latest funding: $100 million, series B

Lead investor: Salesforce Ventures

Other investors: GV (Google Ventures), M12 (Microsoft's Venture Fund), Madrona, Lightspeed Venture Partners

Funding plans: Typeface said the raise would accelerate the adoption of its AI tech.

Celestial AI

Santa Clara-based Celestial AI developed an optical chip technology to accelerate AI model training and compute by solving the memory wall problem. This occurs when the processor’s speed is faster than the rate at which data can be transferred to and from memory.

Optical Compute Interconnect (OCI) helps solve this problem by using light instead of the traditional electricity for data transmission, which accelerates the process.

The startup said it developed its version of OCI − Photonic Fabric, which it said can deliver 25 times greater bandwidth and more than 10 times lower latency and power consumption than its rivals.

Latest funding: $100 million, series B

Lead investors: IAG Capital Partners, Koch Disruptive Technologies, Xora Innovation fund

Other investors: Samsung Catalyst, Smart Global Holdings (SGH), Porsche Automobil Holding SE, The Engine Fund, imec.xpand, M Ventures, Tyche Partners.

Funding plans: The funds will go towards powering accelerated computing for next-generation data centers, the startup said.

Reka AI

San Francisco-based AI research lab Reka AI is developing enterprise-grade large language models and generative models.

Having just emerged from stealth, Reka unveiled Yasa, its enterprise-grade multimodal AI assistant. Yasa is currently in a closed beta.

The startup said its team members were involved in “some of the largest breakthroughs in AI research” at DeepMind, FAIR and Google Brain, contributing to AlphaCode, AlphaStar, Bard, PaLM and others.

Latest funding: $58 million, series A

Lead investors: DST Global Partners, Radical Ventures

Other investors: Snowflake Ventures

Angel investors: Nat Friedman, former GitHub CEO

Funding plans: Reka will use the cash to snap up hardware from Nvidia, chief executive Dani Yogatama told Reuters. Reka is also hiring for technical and non-technical jobs.

Gleamer

French AI startup Gleamer is building AI-powered medical imaging solutions.

Gleamer's clinical diagnostic solutions are certified as a Class IIa medical device under EU MDR and are partly FDA-cleared.

Latest funding: $29 million (€27 million), series B

Lead investors: Supernova Invest, Heal Capital

Other investors: XAnge, Elaia, Bpi France, MACSF, UI Investissement and Crista Galli Ventures

Funding plans: Gleamer is looking to expand its solutions portfolio, strengthen its teams in Europe and America, and accelerate its international expansion plans.

Parabola

San Francisco-based Parabola is developing workflow automation tools for enterprises.

Latest funding: $24 million, series B

Lead investors: OpenView, Matrix, Thrive Capital

Other investors: Flexport

Angel investors: Immad Akhund (CEO and founder of Mercury), Jack Altman (CEO and founder of Lattice), Cristina Cordova (COO at Linear and early Stripe and Notion executive)

Funding plans: Parabola plans to expand its research efforts.