June 27, 2024

Cross my mind

Hi there, 

Here is this week's Hot or Not.

Hot: Cross-border payments tech

We recently zoomed in on early-stage activity in payments to see which markets are gaining momentum. 

Cross-border payments tech topped the list, having drawn $149M across 22 deals since last June.

Investors are betting on early-stage startups in the space to tap into the opportunity presented by growing cross-border payment flows.

However, cross-border payments tech is not alone in the limelight.

What other payments markets are gaining traction? Find out right here.

Not: US-China investment

The US recently proposed a new regulation that would restrict US investment in Chinese tech, applying to everything from equity financing to joint ventures.

It is specifically aiming to block resources from reaching groups working with China’s military.

The regulation is just the latest move made by the US to prevent resources from getting to players it has identified as security threats.

In fact, as geopolitical tension has mounted in recent years, we’ve already seen cross-border tech investment between China and the US drop off.

Discover how this has played out in the AI realm in this research brief.

Hot: Nvidia in quantum

Nvidia is eyeing tomorrow’s frontiers — including quantum computing. 

The $3T company is developing a variety of hardware and software quantum solutions. 

It’s also partnering with other companies to advance an AI and quantum hybrid computing infrastructure. 

For example, Nvidia’s teamed up with SandboxAQ to use AI and quantum simulation to predict chemical reactions across drug discovery, battery design, and other areas.

CB Insights customers can discover the rest of its partnerships in quantum in our Nvidia strategy map.

Not: Legacy MLOps headcounts

As genAI shakes up the machine learning (ML)/AI development landscape, some companies have harnessed the momentum. 

Scale, Databricks, and Hugging Face are all sprinting ahead in terms of headcount growth. 

Others have struggled to adapt to new AI tasks, including legacy MLOps vendors like DataRobot. 

See more on the evolving landscape in the Enterprise AI Roadmap report. 

The +1

Disastrous. Watt is going on here? Shoutout to Scott Solak for sharing this with us.

I love you.

Anand 

@asanwal 

P.S. We’re getting ready to release our State of Venture Q2’24 Report. Dive into the data with our analyst on July 11.

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