In addition to OpenAI, these 12 generative AI unicorns are also worthy of attention

In Q1 2023, total global AI funding fell to $5.4 billion, a 43% quarter-on-quarter decline, which is also the lowest level since Q1 2018.

Written by: Barry

In the first quarter of 2023, many companies in the global technology industry were in trouble due to shortfalls in funds, and there was a wave of large-scale layoffs. According to statistics, during the period from January to March, global technology companies laid off more than 100,000 employees, which has exceeded the total number of layoffs in 2022.

The field of artificial intelligence also seems to be affected.

According to CB Insights data, in the first quarter of 2023, the total amount of global AI financing fell to US$5.4 billion, a decrease of 43% from the previous quarter, which is also the lowest level since the first quarter of 2018.

Meanwhile, the number of financing events fell for the fourth straight quarter to 554, the lowest level since the fourth quarter of 2017.

But it is worth noting that 3 of the 5 largest AI financing events in the first quarter of 2023 came from generative AI companies. This also shows that the popularity of generative AI is not only on the surface, but that investment institutions will actually pay for it.

At present, 13 unicorn companies (valued at more than 1 billion US dollars) have been born in the generative AI segment. Among the five new AI unicorns since 2023, two new generative AI unicorns, Cohere and Runway, are included.

The average time it took these 13 generative AI companies to become unicorns was just 3.6 years. For comparison, the usual seven years to become a unicorn is almost cut in half.

Source: CB Insights

Among them, OpenAI became a unicorn in 2019, and its valuation has increased 10 times since then, leading the way with a valuation of $29 billion. It is followed by Anthropic ($4.4 billion valuation), Cohere ($2 billion valuation) and Hugging Face ($2 billion valuation).

Also included are video and image editing software company Lightricks, writing and art content generator Jasper, work assistance platform Glean, and AI image generator developer Stability.ai, among others.

01.OpenAI

Funding amount: $10.3 billion in financing

Valuation: $29 billion

Financing disclosure time: April 28, 2023

In April of this year, OpenAI completed a financing of 10.3 billion US dollars, with a valuation of 29 billion US dollars. Venture capital firms participating in the round include Tiger Global Management, Sequoia Capital, a16z, Thrive Capital, K2 Global, and Founders Fund. It is reported that the investment amount of this round is 300 million US dollars, which belongs to the same round as Microsoft's earlier shareholding. Earlier this year, Microsoft's investment in OpenAI was said to be around $10 billion.

In 2015, OpenAI was founded by a group of technology leaders, including Sam Altman, Peter Thiel, Reed Hoffman and Elon Musk.

On March 11, 2019, OpenAI announced that it would transition from a "non-profit" nature to a "capped" profit nature, with a profit cap of 100 times any investment. Also this year, Microsoft invested $1 billion in the company and obtained a commercial license for OpenAI technology. Since then, some of OpenAI's technologies have appeared in Microsoft's products and businesses.

It is worth noting that OpenAI has recently made a big move and launched the iPhone application of the chat robot ChatGPT in the United States. It quickly won the top free APP rankings and officially fired the "starting gun" of AI products on the mobile Internet application side. OpenAI has also further launched web browsing and more than 70 third-party plug-ins. Industry insiders expect that this will accelerate the application of GPT large models in vertical industries.

02.Anthropic

Funding: $600 million

Valuation: $4.4 billion

Financing disclosure date: March 9, 2023

Anthropic received two consecutive rounds of investment of US$300 million led by Google and Spark Capital in February and March, and was promoted to a multi-billion dollar unicorn.

Anthropic, founded in 2021, focuses on developing general AI systems and language models. At the end of 2020, OpenAI was exposed to the collective resignation of core employees. Anthropic was created by these departing personnel, including Dario Amodei, former vice president of research at OpenAI, Tom Brown, the first author of the GPT-3 paper, and others. Currently, the size of the Anthropic team is about 40 people, most of whom have participated in the research and development of GPT-2 and GPT-3 models.

It is reported that Dario Amodei's first job when he graduated from university was as a researcher at Baidu, but he left soon, and then worked at Google for 10 months before joining open AI. His reason for leaving open AI is similar to that of Musk - to set up another mountain.

Anthropic's main product is the AI chatbot Claude, which directly competes with ChatGPT. Although there is a gap in performance with GPT4, it focuses on using the "RLHF" language modeling method and builds a model based on the "deep structure" of the language. This modeling method is paired with Anthropic's special settings for controllability , allowing Claude to avoid most of the "harmful output".

03.Cohere

Funding: $250 million

Valuation: $2 billion

Financing disclosure date: May 2, 2023

On May 2, Cohere, a generative AI start-up headquartered in Toronto, Canada, announced a new round of investment of 250 million US dollars, led by Canadian venture capital fund iNovia Capital, other investors include US chip giant Nvidia, CRM (customer relationship Management) giant Salesforce's generative AI venture capital fund, as well as Silicon Valley venture capital institutions Index Ventures, etc., with a post-money valuation of $2 billion.

Founded in 2019, Cohere provides AI technology products similar to ChatGPT, helping companies quickly deploy conversational AI chatbots, generative search engines, text summary summarization, enhanced vector search, etc. It is also one of the few companies that has the technical capabilities to compete with OpenAI One of the most capable AI companies.

Among the three co-founders of Cohere, the two co-founders, Aidan Gomez and Nick Frosst, used to be Google researchers and are the core technicians of the Google Brain team. Among them, Aidan Gomez is one of the authors of the famous Google Transformer framework paper, and Transformer is known as the "grandfather" of ChatGPT. ChatGPT realizes the GPT large model through the Transformer framework and training mechanism.

Earlier, Cohere had raised $170 million, with investors including Index Ventures, Tiger Global, AI technology pioneer and Turing Award winner Geoffrey Hinton, Stanford University professor Fei-Fei Li, etc.

04.Hugging Face

Funding: $100 million

Valuation: $2 billion

Financing disclosure date: May 10, 2023

When Hugging Face was first released five years ago, it was an iPhone chatbot app that allowed teenage users to share computer-generated selfies of themselves and tell gossip, jokes and the like for little to no money.

Hugging Face first went viral in 2018. At the time, Hugging Face began sharing the app's underlying code online for free. The move immediately sparked positive responses from researchers at giants like Google and Microsoft, who began using the code for AI applications.

On Github, the number of open source projects based on this has exceeded 62,000, ranking among the popular resource libraries.

On May 10, the open-source startup Hugging Face announced the completion of a US$100 million Series C round of financing. This round of financing is still led by Lux Capital. Sequoia Capital and Coatue participated in the co-investment for the first time. Other co-investors include Addition, Betaworks and other original investors of Hugging Face.

05.Lightricks

Funding: $130 million

Valuation: $1.8 billion

Financing disclosure time: September 20, 2021

Lightricks, founded by a computer doctor in the field of digital image processing, has been committed to providing content creators with powerful but easy-to-use products since 2013. Products such as Facetune and Videoleap once dominated the rankings of image processing apps in the App Store. The birth of these popular apps provides users with feature-rich and easy-to-operate mobile creation tools without having to rely on relatively complex desktop tools.

The reason why Lightricks can become a "popular model factory" is that in addition to its deep accumulation of image processing technology, the grasp of product functions and ease of use is the key to success.

In 2015, Lightricks opened its A round of financing and received a capital injection of $10 million. In September 2021, the team bucked the trend and raised a D round of US$130 million. The cumulative financing of 4 rounds was 335 million US dollars and reached a valuation of 1.8 billion US dollars.

06.Runway

Funding: $100 million

Valuation: $1.5 billion

Financing disclosure date: May 4, 2023

In early May, video-editing generative AI startup Runway closed a $100 million Series D round, bringing its valuation to a staggering $1.5 billion, up from a $500 million Series C round.

Founded in 2018, Runway has since launched more than 30 artificial intelligence tools for personal and business users, including text-to-image, image-to-image, replace background, green screen, wipe and replace, etc. operate. Its product, RunwayML, has been used in Hollywood blockbusters, such as Michelle Yeoh, who just won the Oscar for Best Actress in "The Universe".

07.Jasper

Funding: $125 million

Valuation: $1.5 billion

Financing disclosure time: October 18, 2022

Before ChatGPT, Jasper was the most promising "AI text generation" tool. Through its text generation feature, Jasper allows users to easily generate Instagram captions, write TikTok video scripts, ad marketing text, email content, and more.

Jasper was co-founded in early 2021 by Dave Rogenmoser, Chris Hull and John Phillip Morgan. Rogenmoser and Chris, former Y Combinator alumni, co-founded a startup called Proof early on that uses algorithms to design websites for businesses.

The Jasper team had only 9 people in one year, and expanded to 160 people in 10 months. In October 2022, Jasper received US$125 million in Series A financing, with a valuation of US$1.5 billion, and last year's revenue reached US$75 million. It took only 18 months from birth to becoming a unicorn.

08.Replit

Amount raised: $97.4 million

Valuation: $1.2 billion

Financing disclosure time: April 25, 2023

At the end of April, Replit, a generative artificial intelligence technology startup, announced that it had received US$97.4 million in B+ round financing, with a post-investment valuation of approximately US$1.2 billion.

Based in San Francisco, Replit was founded in 2016 by programmers Amjad Masad and Faris Masad and designer Haya Odeh. Before starting his own business, Amjad Masad worked as an engineer at Yahoo and Facebook.

Replit has developed a code generator called "Ghostwriter", which provides developers with an online collaborative integrated development environment (IDE) that supports Java, Python, Go, C++ and other programming languages. Through Replit, users can share the workspace with others, view the editing status of the document in real time, leave messages for each other, and debug the code together.

09.Inflection

Funding: $225 million

Valuation: $1.2 billion

Financing disclosure date: May 13, 2022

Inflection, an AI company co-founded by DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, recently launched an artificial intelligence chatbot called Pi that can listen to people's daily stress and provide similar psychological insights. function of the consultant.

In May 2022, Inflection received up to US$225 million in seed round investment and plans to further raise US$675 million.

10. AdeptAI

Funding: $350 million

Valuation: $1 billion

Financing Disclosure Date: March 14, 2023

AdeptAI is a startup founded by former OpenAI VP of Engineering David Luan.

AdeptAI's product ACT-1 is a large-scale language model that can directly interact with browsers and commercial software to automatically complete complex operations. For example, on Salesforce, it will require more than a dozen clicks and input operations, but after the user enters the command, it can be automatically completed in one go.

On March 14, AdeptAI received $350 million in Series B investment, jointly led by General Catalyst and Spark Capital, followed by Greylock, Microsoft, and NVIDIA, becoming a new unicorn.

11.Character.ai

Funding: $150 million

Valuation: $1 billion

Financing Disclosure Date: March 23, 2023

On March 23, Character.ai received a US$150 million investment led by a16z, becoming a new unicorn. Its product is similar to ChatGPT, which can intelligently talk to humans, but its product tone is more entertainment and social. Users can create "characters" (whether they are celebrities or original characters), formulate their "personality", set specific parameters, and post them to the community for others to chat with. The company says it sees nearly 100 million monthly site visits, a fourfold increase in two months.

The founder of Character.ai, Noam Shazeer, is a former chief software engineer at Google and one of the authors of the Transformer paper. Previously, he joined Google at the end of 2000 and was one of Google's most important early employees until his final departure in 2021.

12.Stability.ai

Funding: $101 million

Valuation: $1 billion

Financing disclosure date: October 17, 2022

Emad Mostaque, who has worked as an engineer, analyst, and investment officer in several technology companies, decided to use his at least 20 years of experience in investment funds to set up a non-profit model like Open AI and a more open institution.

In 2020, he founded Stability.ai. Stable Diffusion is an AI technology model that generates images based on text. It only takes a few seconds to generate images with high resolution and high definition without losing authenticity and artistry. Additionally, the company's Dance Diffusion can generate musical snippets by training on hundreds of hours of existing songs.

In October last year, Stability.ai announced that it had received $101 million in investment from Coatue Management, Lightspeed Venture Partners and O'Shaughnessy Ventures LLC, with a post-money valuation of approximately $1 billion at the time.

13.Glean

Funding: $100 million

Valuation: $1 billion

Financing Disclosure Date: May 18, 2023

California-based Glean was founded in 2019 by Google engineer Jain. In May of this year, Glean announced that it had completed a US$100 million Series C financing, led by Sequoia Capital, with a market value of US$1 billion.

Glean's product positioning is an AI-based enterprise search and knowledge management platform. Users can complete cross-application and personalized searches on one interface of Glean, and find internal knowledge and data faster and more accurately. It is reported that Glean has more than 70 enterprise customers in various industries, including technology, media, education and healthcare.