Silicon Valley Funding News - Week of June 5, 2023. Vectara Raised $28.5M Seed

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I am super excited to announce our partnership with Amr Awadallah (founder and CTO of Cloudera), Amin Ahmad, Tallat M. Shafaat (two amazing core search developers from Google) and the Vectara team to lead their seed round of $28.5M. I believe the Vectara team are set to take the Enterprise Search industry by storm.

Here are a few great reads for the week:

🧸 San Francisco is Back! My team and I are so happy we were able to be a small part in bringing San Francisco back with #SFTechWeek! Over 100 founders applied to pitch, 600+ people in the community applied to attend, and we served over 300 🔥🍗 which for sure could be hotter 🔥🔥🔥. Of the 8 AI startups that pitched, our winner, Tony Mao - founder of Nullify, came all the way from Sydney, Australia to join this contest and won a startup booth at Collision Conference in June. Congrats Tony and thank you to all all judges and attendees! Read more The Information and check out the photos.
💭 Why does an LLM hallucinate? 1) LLM’s knowledge is defined by its training dataset. When an LLM is trained on a dataset that doesn’t have the knowledge required to answer the question, it may hallucinate a response. 2) An LLM does not have a good way to check the factual accuracy of its responses. It just outputs a response, and it may be completely incorrect yet sound very convincing. 3) LLMs are not generally optimized to say “I don’t know” when they don’t have enough information. Therefore, when the LLM has no answer, it generates whatever is the most probable response. But remember that “most probable” does not necessarily mean “true”. This is why Vectara's work is so important for Fortune 500 companies. Read more on Vectara's blog
🥞🍳☕️ The $1 Trillion Company That Started at Denny’s - AI made Nvidia the world’s most valuable chip maker. So did three guys sipping diner coffee and planning to conquer markets that barely existed. Great recap by WSJ. I also highly recommend the full history of Nvidia on the Acquired podcast. A great weekend listen.
🌙 Irresponsible Moonlighting is Most Common Early Startup Mistake - If you are still employed please be very careful not to use your company’s resources to produce your product and please do not work on your next idea during business hours. To the best of my knowledge US law allows you to work on your own resources and in your own hours and let you personally own your IP. Great reminder by Mark Suster
💼 AI Is Coming for White-Collar Jobs - Goldman Sachs estimates that 25% of current work tasks (300 million jobs) could be automated by AI in the U.S. and Europe. Traditionally high skill, non-routine jobs are highly susceptible to automation from AI (legal & financial operations).

This week a total of 18 startups raised $451.9M in funding, 4 M&As:

$123.9M goes to 8 Enterprise startups
$68M goes to 3 FinTech startups
$52M goes to 1 Crypto/Web3 startup
$43.5M goes to 2 Marketplace startups
$3.5M goes to 1 Construction startup
$45M goes to 1 Healthcare startup
$116M goes to 2 BioTech startups

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Edith

See more details below:

Funding (300 miles radius from Silicon Valley)

Enterprise

Cortex (internal developer portal) raised $35M Series B led by IVP
Vectara (conversational search platform) raised $28.5M Seed led by Race Capital
MindsDB (applied ML platform) raised $25M Seed led by Mayfield Fund
Predibase (declarative ML platform) raised $12.2M Series A led by Felicis
Alcion (data management) raised $8M Seed
8Flow (customer support workflow automation) raised $6.6M Seed led by Caffeinated Capital
Beehive AI (qualitative intelligence platform) raised $5.1M Seed led by Valley Capital Partners
Platformatic (back-end development platform) raised $3.5M Seed led by Decibel Partners

FinTech

PayNearMe (consumer payments platform) raised $45M Series D led by Queensland Investment Corporation
Vartana (B2B sales closing and financing platform) raised $20M Series B led by Activant Capital
Holdings (cash management) raised $7M Seed led by Album VC

Crypto/Web3

Magic (WaaS provider) raised $52M Series B led by PayPal Ventures

Marketplace

Swing (substitute teacher marketplace) raised $38M Series C led by Apax Partners, Reach Capital
Wellplaece (dental marketplace) raised $5.5M Seed led by Bee Partners, Eniac Ventures

Construction

UpCodes (AI research assistant for building codes) raised $3.5M Series A led by Building Ventures

Healthcare

Carrum Health (value-based healthcare platform) raised $45M Series B led by OMERS Growth Equity

BioTech

Eikon Therapeutics (drug discovery) raised $106M Series C
LTZ Therapeutics (cancer immunotherapy) raised $10M Seed led by Qiming Venture Partners

IPO & M&A (300 miles radius from Silicon Valley)

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