May 30, 2024

Megamind

Hi there,

Here is this week’s Hot or Not.

Hot: AI mega-rounds

Elon Musk’s xAI announced it raised $6B on Monday. 

The LLM developer’s potential to draw on datasets across Musk’s businesses like Tesla and X helped drive interest in the round, as highlighted by CBI’s funding insights.

It’s part of a string of massive AI rounds this month, including:

• Wayve (autonomous vehicles) — $1.05B Series C
• Scale (data infrastructure)  — $1B Series F at a $13.8B valuation
• DeepL (translation) — $300M Series B at a $2B valuation
• Suno (music creation) — $125M at a $500M valuation

Mega-rounds ($100M+ deals) bolstered AI funding totals in the first quarter. See more in our State of AI Report.

Not: Cue Health

At-home diagnostic test provider Cue Health recently announced that it’s shuttering operations. 

Its financial data reveals that this outcome was probably a long time coming.

Thanks to its Covid test offering, the company grew rapidly amid the pandemic — raising a $235M Series D in May 2021 and IPOing just 4 months later.

And as demand for Covid tests fell, the company communicated on earnings calls that it was pushing to diversify its test menu.

However, its revenue evaporated as Covid test sales dropped and its efforts to expand failed to pan out in the way it hoped, resulting in negative net income for 2022 and 2023.

And at the same time, its stock price continued to trend down from its IPO high.

CBI customers can dig deeper into Cue Health’s financial data on its profile.

And they can also analyze the at-home lab testing space in this market map.

Hot: Blockchain deals

After a consistent downward trend for 2 years, funding & deals for blockchain startups grew in Q1’24. 

SEC approval of spot bitcoin ETFs in January brought renewed investor confidence to the sector.

With one month left in Q2, the second quarter is on track for another bump in funding and deals (at current run rates). 

More on the trend in our newsletter last week here.

Not: Unsustainable data centers

The data centers powering AI technologies guzzle a ton of water to keep cool.

The average data center consumes about as much water as 100,000 homes every day.

Under pressure to cut back on water consumption, data center operators are turning to emerging tech like immersion cooling.

This method involves directly submerging the hardware into dielectric fluids (liquids that don’t conduct electricity) to prevent overheating.

Learn more about immersion cooling and other tech enabling greener data centers here.

The +1

High standards. Don’t drink and chart, folks.

I love you.

Anand 

@asanwal 

P.S. Insurtech 50 applications are open — and you have until July 11 to share yours with us. If you know one of the most promising insurtech startups in the world, tell us about it here.

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