Sifted - Stability AI lands new funds

Good morning there,

Today we've got news that London-based Stability AI has raised fresh funding from Lightspeed and Coatue, with a new CEO to boot.

More on that below and — if you’re feeling starved of AI stories lately —you’ll find lots more in our new release, the Sifted Rising 100, which ranks the top 100 B2B SaaS companies in Europe (for the AI-weary, fear not, there’s plenty of climate tech, healthtech, fintech, dev tools and more in there too).

While AI has been great for making silly videos, it’s specialised adoption of the technology that most people will care about in the long run. And we've got some really good examples of practical-right-now AI in our big story today.

Elsewhere:

• Climate risk startup Climate X raises $18m Series A.
• Germany’s most active early-stage VCs

— Éanna Kelly, contributing editor

/A message from our sponsor Northern Data Group

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The startup that all the chicks love

Fair warning: the less you know about the egg industry’s grisly secrets, the better you’ll sleep. 

But I recently learnt a dark fact and feel compelled to share it. Namely: because male chicks don’t lay eggs or produce valued meat, newborns are killed in their billions each year.

There has to be a better way — and there is, says Munich-based startup Orbem. The company’s AI technology, born out of PhD research at the Technical University of Munich, is being used to determine the sex of a chick before it hatches — something called in-ovo sexing — which eliminates the need to destroy young males.

Cofounder Pedro Gómez says his tech is able to scan an egg in one second, alongside MRI, faster and cheaper than existing processes. Unwanted male eggs can then be discovered and destroyed before the point at which, according to studies, the embryo feels pain.

The company is finding customers in Germany and France, two places that have outlawed chick culling. Italy aims to follow suit with a ban in 2027 and is another promising market.

The example of Orbem — a company that ranks 16th on our newly-published Sifted Rising 100, an AI-heavy ranking of the top B2B SaaS companies in Europe — reminds us that, for all the madness around AI, the tech is also finding a useful foothold in many industries.

Nabla (64th) is another example of AI being usefully deployed. The Parisian company has created an AI assistant to reduce the amount of time doctors spend on admin. It listens to, transcribes and writes up notes from conversations between clinician and patient (some brand this behind-the-scenes work “ambient AI”).

Meanwhile, if you’ve ever had the misfortune of writing bids for public contracts, you’ll know how tedious it can be. London’s AutogenAI (39th) tailors AI models, built on GPT-4 and similar services, to help take a significant bite out of this mundane work. “OpenAI is providing the electricity, we’re providing the electric drill,” says founder and CEO Sean Williams, who got the idea for his company after a friend, who works at AI lab DeepMind, put him onto the potential of AI models (not a bad tip, as it goes).

AutogenAI’s tool is good for one thing and one thing only. “If you want AI to write a poem about a naughty squirrel going to the moon, we’re not your guys. We’re not smarter than Google or OpenAI — but we are specialists,” says Williams. 

Which brings us back to Orbem. As Gómez reminds me: "AI chatbots are cute — but they don’t solve important problems."

— Éanna Kelly, contributing editor

💰 Exclusive: London-based climate risk startup Climate X has raised $18m in Series A funding as it expands to the US. The four-year-old company provides customers like real estate companies and mortgage lenders with a climate risk platform to assess the impact of climate change events on their assets.

👀 GenAI unicorn Stability AI has announced it’s raised fresh funds and appointed a new CEO — three months on from the departure of founder Emad Mostaque. 

• Investors include Greycroft, Coatue Management, Sound Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners, alongside former Facebook president Sean Parker and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. The size of the round is undisclosed.
• Prem Akkaraju, who was previously CEO of visual effects company Weta Digital, also invested and becomes CEO. 

🇫🇷 Paris-based startup Pasqal, which designs and builds quantum computers, has passed the 1,000-qubit milestone — meaning that its processors can handle more than 1,000 quantum bits, the small particles that are the equivalent of a bit in classical computers, and which carry quantum information.

• Pasqal’s quantum computers are still far off being able to carry out any meaningful computation for industrial use cases — but this technological development puts the French startup on a similar trajectory to US tech giant IBM, which showcased a 1,121-qubit chip at the end of last year.

🛵 Speedy grocery startup Getir has agreed a restructuring deal that will see Mubadala Investment Company — Abu Dhabi’s wealth fund — lead a $250m capital injection and take control of its grocery operations in Turkey, the Financial Times reports. The restructure will see the business split into its food delivery business in Turkey, and a separate business made up of its other assets. 

👨‍👨‍👦‍👦 How to crowdfund — Sonia Kaurah, Tala Thrive’s cofounder and CEO, shares her top tips.

🇩🇪 Germany’s most active early-stage VCs.

📣 Readers, we want to hear from you. What’s the best thing on European tech you’ve read recently? Drop us a line.

Meet Europe’s Rising 100 2024

Introducing the ultimate list of B2B SaaS startups we believe will someday join the ranks of the $1bn-plus unicorns. See who made the cut and explore the market forces shaping and shaking them in our latest report. 

July 3 | Online. French tech reporter Daphné Leprince-Ringuet will be moderating an upcoming Sifted Talks with industry experts to find out how tech leaders can effectively harness the power of AI and machine learning for better business results. RSVP.

July 9 | London. Join us for a live panel discussion on the impact of AI on work hosted by Startup Life’s Anisah Osman Britton. We'll be discussing things like what's possible with AI right now, how you take advantage of new technology as you scale and whether AI really can replace humans at work. There’ll also be networking and (free) canapés and drinks. Spaces are limited — RSVP now to secure your place.

Bern-based Neustark, a carbon removal startup, raised $69m in a debt and equity funding round. Decarbonization Partners led the round and was joined by investors including Blume Equity, Siemens Financial Services, Verve Ventures, ACE Ventures and Holcim. UBS provided debt funding. 

Vienna-based Prewave, which provides an AI-powered supply chain intelligence platform, raised $67m in Series B funding. Hedosophia led the round and was joined by investors including Creandum, Ventech, Kompas, Speedinvest and Working Capital Fund.

Zurich, Switzerland-based SkyCell, which provides temperature controlled logistics containers for the pharmaceutical industry, raised $59m in Series D funding from investors including Tybourne Capital Management, CCI, Catalyst and M&G Investments.

Ghent, Belgium-based TechWolf, which uses AI to help businesses get an overview of the skills in their organisation and spot skill gaps, raised $42.75m in Series B funding. Felix Capital led the round and was joined by investors including 20VC, Acadian Ventures, Notion Capital, PMV, SemperVirens, Fortino Capital, Stride VC, SAP, ServiceNow and Workday.

Berlin-based LiveEO, which uses satellite data and AI to help companies manage climate risks impacting their infrastructure, raised €25m in Series B funding. NordicNinja and DeepTech & Climate Fonds led the round.

Darmstadt, Germany-based Compredict, which uses AI-based virtual sensor and durability analytics to help original equipment manufacturers and suppliers predict mechanical failures and calculate the remaining lifetime of vehicle components, raised $15m in Series B funding. Woven Capital led the round and was joined by investors including Shift4Good.

Cambridge, UK-based EpilepsyGTx, a preclinical-stage biotech developing gene therapies to treat focal refractory epilepsy, raised $10m in seed funding. UCL Technology Fund led the round and was joined by investors including Health Technology Holding.

Paris-based Estuaire, a flight data analytics platform to help airlines and airports reduce emissions, raised €2.2m in seed funding. Satgana led the round and was joined by investors including Safran Corporate Ventures, XAnge and AFI Ventures.

Dublin-based MarketSizer, a data platform that helps businesses more accurately size potential markets, raised €1m in pre-seed funding. Delta Partners led the round and was joined by investors including Enterprise Ireland.

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