May 23, 2024

Riches to riches

Hi there,

Here is this week’s Hot or Not.

Hot: Billionaire talk

Twitter has lots of dumb posts, but this one (see below) was probably the dumbest.

Turning $300K into a $2T company like Bezos did with Amazon is not normal.

We track over ten thousand seed financings every year at CB Insights.

Of companies founded since 2000, only Tesla and Meta have crossed the $1T market cap mark at some point. 

These founders are “freaks” in the best way possible...they innovate, solve problems that customers have, create jobs, etc.

Yes — they and their companies are far from perfect.

But overall, they should be celebrated, as should the USA for being the only place in the world that makes it possible to achieve such big things. 

I posted the graphic below on LinkedIn and the discussion got heated. I also got called a billionaire bootlicker. Wdyt?

Source: X (Twitter)

Not: P&C insurers in genAI

Despite skyrocketing interest and investment in generative AI, P&C insurance leaders have inked relatively few genAI deals or partnerships.

While insurance companies broadly are pursuing genAI-related opportunities for customer experience and workflow initiatives, they are cautiously approaching genAI adoption.

The first-mover opportunity is up for grabs. 

CB Insights customers can see where 15 leading property and casualty (P&C) insurers are placing their tech bets for the future here.

Hot: Data labeling

AI startup Scale just raised a $1B Series F round, nearly doubling its valuation to $13.8B.

The deal highlights the importance of data labeling in the age of generative AI.

If data isn’t labeled properly, genAI models lack the context necessary to learn from it.

isht in = isht out.

Scale is part of a vast ecosystem of companies working to create, curate, and manage training data for AI models.

Explore the landscape in our AI training data market map.

Not: AI in Europe

AI funding jumped by 24% QoQ globally in Q1’24, but it fell by a third in Europe.

Meanwhile, AI deal count in Europe also dropped, declining by 24%.

Europe being better at regulation than innovation seems to be scaring away investment in one of the only hot sectors right now. 

Conversely, the US saw funding rise by 52% to hit a 4-quarter high in Q1’24.

Learn more about how AI activity breaks down across regions and industries in our State of AI Q1’24 Report.

The +1

Turbulence. What fresh HE-double-hockey-sticks is this? Shoutout to Eric Braun for this monstrosity. 

I love you.

Anand 

@asanwal 

P.S. We recently dove into the AI strategies of the world’s largest companies. If you didn’t get the chance to attend (or if you did and want to go for round 2), download the briefing recording here.

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