August 29, 2024

Savings = 4,500 years

Hi there,

Here is this week’s Hot or Not.

Hot: More AI coding

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy laid out some pretty wild stats on LinkedIn in the last week about the impact of its Amazon Q genAI assistant for software hygiene work:

• Saved the equivalent of 4,500 developer-years of work upgrading applications to Java 17
• Shipped 79% of the auto-generated code reviews without any additional changes
• Estimated $260M in annualized efficiency gains

Source: Andy Jassy via LinkedIn

Amazon’s Q is just one of many coding assistants on the scene. 

Magic raised $320M today, bringing its total funding to $465M.

Other startups in the space that have raised massive rounds include: 

• Augment ($252M in total funding)
• Cognition AI ($196M)
• Poolside ($126M)
• Codeium ($90M)
• Cursor ($68M)
• Tabnine ($55M)

A number of companies in the space are aiming to build coding agents that can replace human developers — dive in with this free report.

Not: Expensive LLM tokens

The cost of 1M tokens is 240x cheaper than it was 18 months ago. 

If you aren’t already, companies should be building on LLMs with a view that costs will continue to decline.

Customers can explore the exploding genAI ecosystem with our market map here.

Source: Elad Gil via X

Hot: Healthy insurtechs

We combed through a ton of CBI datasets to select this year’s Insurtech 50 winners, including our proprietary Mosaic scores, which measure private company health and growth potential.

Forty-one of the 50 winners have a CB Insights Mosaic score of at least 700 out of 1,000 (as of 8/26/24), placing them in the top 3% of private companies we track.

Among this year’s winners, Next Insurance has the highest Mosaic score (898).

In 2024, its high Mosaic score has been driven by a series of business relationships — for example, it has:

• Collaborated with Tensorflight to automate commercial property inspections
• Teamed up with LegalZoom to generate tailored insurance quotes
• Partnered with Netchex to streamline access to workers’ comp policies

Dive deeper into Next Insurance’s Mosaic history on its company profile.

Not: US fintech unicorns

New fintech unicorns (companies reaching $1B+ valuations) have become rare.

But they didn’t completely disappear in H1’24, as we’ve seen in digital health, insurtech, and climate tech.

9 fintech unicorns were born in H1’24, and zooming in on these rarities reveals a significant geographical shift away from the US.

While the US accounts for more than half of all fintech unicorns, it is home to just 2 out of 9 born in 2024 so far.

Learn more about fintech unicorn activity and what it tells us about the sector in this brief.

The +1

SOS. Skittle vomit pie chart in 3D. Nice touch with the data labels.

I love you.

Anand

@asanwal 

P.S. Did you get a chance to attend our briefing on big tech activity in healthcare? If not, download the recording today.

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