The remarkable rise of ChatGPT, the chatbot that OpenAI launched in November 2022, along with increased interest in image generators – like DALL-E, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion, music/sound generators and code generators alike, generative artificial intelligence (” AI”) has taken the tech world by storm. Generative AI — a type of artificial intelligence technology trained to produce different types of content, including text, images, audio, and synthetic data that responds to user input — is not just limited to impacting Silicon Valley, so it has the potential to “ to change how everything from the written word to art is created,” as Axios put it not so long ago. It also raises some interesting and nuanced questions in the legal field, including those related to authorship/ownership and infringement.
In light of this (and given the alleged waning interest/slowing in spending on Web3 ventures), a wave of funding and acquisition activity for the Generative AI space is upon us. Alongside tech titans — like Microsoft (which invested $10 billion in ChatGPT developer OpenAI in January) and Google (which backed ChatGPT rival Anthropic with a nearly $400 million investment in February) — who Plunging money into AI, venture firms have increased investments in generative AI by 425 percent to $2.1 billion since 2020, according to Pitchbook calculations.
To get an overview of which generative AI ventures are getting the most traction — and funding — and to get a broader sense of the temperature of this space, we’ve put together an (ongoing) tracker of generative AI-specific funding and M&A. These firms range from those focused on using generative AI to compile/analyze environmental, social and governance (“ESG”) data for businesses (including fashion/retail) to those using generative Want to bring AI to the legal sector…
March 1, 2023 – ESG data startup SESAMm raises $37 million in Series B2 round
SESAMm has raised €35 million ($37 million) in a Series B2 funding round co-led by Elaia and Opera Tech Ventures, BNP Paribas’ venture capital arm. As a leader in natural language processing, an area of AI, SESAMm enables companies to track relevant ESG data by “generating insights to identify investment, customer and supplier, ESG and positive impact controversies, among other things.” The new funding will allow SESAMm to “further expand into US and Asian markets, support technology development to generate AI-powered ESG and sentiment analysis, and hire key talent in sustainability, technology, sales and marketing.” . This round increases SESAMm’s total funding to around EUR 50 million since mid-2016.
March 1, 2023 – Transmetrics, provider of AI supply chain solutions, raises 2.5 million euros
Transmetrics has raised EUR 2.5 million in a financing round co-led by the European Innovation Council Fund and Impetus Capital. Based in Sofia, Bulgaria, the platform provides AI solutions for the supply chain industry, specifically to optimize transportation planning by leveraging the power of predictive analytics and machine learning to address extreme logistics inefficiencies.
This is a brief excerpt from a dataset released exclusively to TFL Enterprise subscribers. To gain access to our latest generative AI investment and M&A tracker, inquire today about signing up for an Enterprise subscription.
