AI startups were red hot in 2023. Check out 37 pitch decks used by founders to land funds from some of the world's biggest tech investors.
Riddhi Kanetkar
·2 min read
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AI startups raised $60 billion last year and investors have continued to pile in on the tech in 2023.
The frenzy around AI comes after the launch of OpenAI's ChatGPT chatbot.
Below are 37 pitch decks used by startups deploying AI in everything from health to property.
There's an AI gold rush right now.
Investment into startups using or creating artificial intelligence hit an all-time high in 2021, with $113.3 billion poured into the sector, per Dealroom data. This fell to $60 billion in 2022 but that figure is likely to be exceeded this year with $57 billion already invested by venture capitalists.
The investor rush is down, in part, to the release of ChatGPT in late 2022 by US startup OpenAI, cofounded by Sam Altman and Elon Musk. The chatbot became the fastest-growing app in internet history, and almost immediately disrupted education, copywriting, consultancy, and other sectors.
It's possible that it's just another bubble, akin to the short-lived Web3 fad of 2022. But proponents say AI has broader use cases and few similarities to crypto's "cynical business models". AI was also alive and well long before the current hype around generative AI.
Recent, high-profile rounds include Andreessen Horowitz and ex-GitHub CEO Nat Friedman leading an anticipated $18 million round into voice intelligence startup ElevenLabs, at a possible valuation of $100 million. Venture capitalists are also eyeing startups in the vector-database sector, where valuations are hitting up to $700 million.
These are some of the pitch decks that founders have recently used to raise millions for their AI startups, from top investors such as Temasek, Insight Partners, Alven, Index Ventures, and more.
If 11 figures is your attention threshold, you may be interested in learning that the combined enterprise value (EV) of Spanish startups surpassed €100 billion in 2023, according to Dealroom's latest report on the Spanish tech ecosystem. As we'll see, venture investment into Spanish startups also held up quite well, with €2.2 billion raised across some 850 funding rounds. Spain's venture capital tally was lower last year than in 2021 and 2022; that's no surprise as these years were outliers.
DeepL, an AI language translation startup, raised $300 million on a $2 billion valuation; Scale AI, a data-labeling platform for machine learning models, secured $1 billion as its valuation nearly doubled to $13.8 billion; and H, a fledgling French startup working on its own frontier models, raised an eye-watering $220 million seed round at an undisclosed valuation (though it surely takes H comfortably into unicorn territory). While all the usual institutional investors are present, such as Accel, Index, and Y Combinator (YC), these investments really underscore the corporate clamber to get in on the action while keeping regulators at arm's length. Take Scale AI, a company that had so far attracted purely institutional and angel investors from its inception in 2016 through its Series E round in 2021.
It’s not often that you hear about a seed round above $10 million. H, a startup based in Paris and previously known as Holistic AI, has announced a $220 million seed round just a few months after the company’s inception. Charles Kantor, the startup’s co-founder and CEO, was a university researcher at Stanford.
A new crop of early-stage startups — along with some recent VC investments — illustrates a niche emerging in the autonomous vehicle technology sector. Two recent entrants -- Seattle-based Overland AI and New Brunswick, Canada-based Potential -- are poised to get a first-mover advantage on this segment of autonomy. While these startups are applying their tech in different ways, Overland AI and Potential do share some common off-road ground.
The OpenAI Startup Fund, a venture fund that invests in early-stage AI companies and has recently transferred legal control from Sam Altman to Ian Hathaway, has closed on an additional $5 million, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The fresh funds were raised from two investors who transferred the capital into a special purpose vehicle, a legal entity associated with the OpenAI Startup Fund: OpenAI Startup Fund SPV III, L.P. This is the third time the OpenAI Startup Fund has raised an SPV.
Plenty of founders have a difficult decision to make early in their journey: where to set up shop. For deep tech founders, the decision is complicated by the fact that they typically need more from their space. In the past, deep tech founders often had to go it alone; there wasn’t much in the way of assistance as they migrated out of their academic labs and into the startup world.
Making life better for people with disabilities is a laudable goal, but accessibility tech hasn't traditionally been popular among VCs. In 2022, disability tech companies attracted around $4 billion in early-stage investments, which was a fraction of fintech’s intake, for example. One reason is that disability tech startups are often considered too niche to attain business viability -- at least on the scale that venture capital demands.
With its list of Apple Design Awards finalists, Apple is celebrating indie apps and startups over bigger tech firms — including those offering AI chatbots. At a time when its App Store model has been called into question by legislators and regulators alike, Apple's annual list of what it considers the best and most technically innovative software available on its platform is turning its attention to the little guy. There's no ChatGPT to be found on Apple's list of finalists, for example.
AI models are always surprising us, not just in what they can do, but what they can't, and why. An interesting new behavior is both superficial and revealing about these systems: they pick random numbers as if they're human beings. This is actually a very old and well known limitation we, humans, have: we overthink and misunderstand randomness.
Being an MLB umpire is a thankless job, both emotionally taxing and physically strenuous. But Hernández’s outwardly standoffish attitude and penchant for comically bad calls did him no favors.
Last week, we reported on how Copper Banking, a digital banking service aimed at teens, abruptly discontinued its bank deposit accounts and debit cards. The situation was just one of many where companies and consumers are being impacted by the implosion of banking-as-a-service company (BaaS) Synapse.
The founder of the spyware app pcTattletale said his company is "out of business and completely done" following a data breach over the weekend. The shutdown comes days after a hacker defaced the spyware maker's website and published links containing large amounts of data from pcTattletale's servers, including databases of customers' information and some victims’ stolen data. The now-defunct app had 138,000 customers who had signed up to use the service, per data breach notification site Have I Been Pwned.
The tech layoff wave is still going strong in 2024. Following significant workforce reductions in 2022 and 2023, this year has already seen 60,000 job cuts across 254 companies, according to independent layoffs tracker Layoffs.fyi. Companies like Tesla, Amazon, Google, TikTok, Snap and Microsoft have conducted sizable layoffs in the first months of 2024.