AI Hustle: News on Open AI, ChatGPT, Midjourney, NVIDIA, Anthropic, Open Source LLMs: AlphaSense Secures $150M at $2.5B Valuation for AI Market Insights

Welcome to the OpenAI podcast, the podcast that opens up the world of AI in a quick and

concise manner.

Tune in daily to hear the latest news and breakthroughs in the rapidly evolving world

of artificial intelligence.

If you've been following the podcast for a while, you'll know that over the last six

months I've been working on a stealth AI startup.

Of the hundreds of projects I've covered, this is the one that I believe has the greatest

potential.

So today I'm excited to announce AIBOX.

AIBOX is a no-code AI app building platform paired with the App Store for AI that lets

you monetize your AI tools.

The platform lets you build apps by linking together AI models like chatGPT, mid-journey

and 11Labs, eventually will integrate with software like Gmail, Trello and Salesforce

so you can use AI to automate every function in your organization.

To get notified when we launch and be one of the first to build on the platform, you

can join the wait list at AIBOX.AI, the link is in the show notes.

We are currently raising a seed round of funding.

If you're an investor that is focused on disruptive tech, I'd love to tell you more

about the platform.

You can reach out to me at jaden at AIBOX.AI, I'll leave that email in the show notes.

As the market intelligence industry is growing rapidly, it's actually projected to I think

reach around $84 billion in revenue this year.

Startups and legacy players are both kind of racing to innovate and I've actually spoken

to a number of different market intelligence platforms and I see a lot of synergy especially

once you start involving AI in the space.

So AlphaSense is a New York based startup that provides a bunch of different cutting

edge solutions in the space.

It's announced, of course, like I mentioned, this $150 million series E funding round and

they're doing this to essentially double down on its expansion efforts.

So the round really kind of catapults AlphaSense's valuation to about $2.5 billion and it is

led by bond with participation from Capital G which is Alphabet's investment arm focused

on larger capital outlays.

They also have Viking Global Investors, Goldman Sachs and a new investor which is BAM Elevate.

The fundraising comes at a time when securing capital and strong valuations is increasingly

challenging except it would appear for AI startups.

Even for startups that have really promising technologies, this is a bit of a downturn

right now in the markets.

So AlphaSense has already gained attention from some of the biggest names in business.

They have over 4,000 enterprise customers.

The startup serves a wide spectrum of the economy including a significant portion of

the S&P 500, major global banks, consultancies and tech giants like Google and Microsoft.

So the company's strong customer base and I think the substantial figure of this kind

of latest funding round underscore its prominence in an ever-evolving industry.

The company's fundraising journey hasn't been without bumps though.

I'll say, while AlphaSense has recently amassed I think around $325 million over the last

15 months, the series E announcement came after a three month delay.

So originally this was slated for release in June and the announcement was kind of pushed

back for undisclosed reasons but I'm assuming maybe the markets weren't favorable or they

had some sort of internal issues at the company and maybe they're waiting to push out some

new products that would make them more exciting and attractive to investors.

So what really sets AlphaSense apart in of course a sea of market intelligence platforms

I've mentioned, I've spoken with a number of them is really it's more than just a data

aggregator.

So the platform combines data crawling capabilities with insight extraction.

So it's huge coverage extends to around 10,000 sources of information.

So this is ranging from public and private content to data published by research firms,

governmental bodies and competitors.

So AlphaSense has also focused on essentially enriching its financial insights through some

strategic acquisitions such as Stream which is a platform that transcribes and catalogs

expert interviews and Centio which is targeted at investment managers.

So the startup is notably leveraging machine learning and natural language processing to

convert raw data into digestible narratives and graphics.

And according to Jack Coco who is the founder and CEO of AlphaSense, the platform's value

lies in its ability to quote focus on the search for unstructured information and provide

structure to it.

So I think right now the rise of generative AI platforms like of course Chatchapiti pose

a question mark for AlphaSense's future when asked about the impact Coco you know conceded

that Chatchapiti gives quote somewhat random results and doesn't understand the business

or commercial standpoint.

However he was quick to highlight AlphaSense's competitive advantages saying quote we are

training our own large language models and we are seeing better performance that way.

But he also kind of issued a caveat noting that you know keeping pace with advancements

is critical for the startups long term success.

So when we kind of look at you know future proofing market intelligence what that's

going to look like for them and for perhaps others right.

I think AlphaSense appears to be taking sort of a multi-pronged approach to maintaining

its edge.

I think they're pretty well aware the landscape should definitely change in as little as a

year.

So as Jay Simmons who's a general partner at Bondstead quote with the ability to deliver

the right insights and data to help businesses confidently make everyday strategic decisions

AlphaSense struck us as a category creator emerging into one of those iconic companies

that significantly advances how the business would work.

So I think in an industry where changes you know the only constant especially everything

we're seeing in AI today AlphaSense is definitely kind of banking on its technology.

They're also you know banking on their client relationships and now I think they have a

fairly sizable war chest which they're hoping to use to stay ahead of the curve.

You know all of this being said though I really do think that they will face a very

significant competition out of open AI and chat GPT and not necessarily just a vanilla

chat GPT tool for example but I also think that you know the ability that you know open

AI gives to other developers to use their platform as an API.

Of course AlphaSense is trying to build their own natural language processing and their

own AI models and whatnot but I think there's going to be a lot of platforms that leverage

just chat GPT and try to find ways to essentially get some of the same data gathering and just

pair it up with chat GPT and they're going to AlphaSense is going to have a little bit

of competition in this regard.

Now they do have a lot of money they've just raised a lot of funds so it's going to be

interesting to follow them and see you know how far ahead they're able to stay in front

of the curve but definitely a company that's raised a lot of money and one that will be

following in the future.

If you are looking for an innovative and creative community of people using chat GPT you need

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link in the comment we'd love to have you in the community.

Thanks for joining me on the open AI podcast it would mean the world to me if you would

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Machine-generated transcript that may contain inaccuracies.