Sifted’s Rising star in Gen AI
Tenyks
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ChatGPT and its cousins are here to take over
Last updated: 9 Mar 2023
Market 101
Forget the crypto craze: the latest shiny toy is AI. Creative or generative AI tools, like the powerful ChatGPT, can (almost) instantly create vast amounts of content — be it essays, jokes, poetry, job applications, images, video, audio or code — in response to text prompts. The hypesters say this type of AI, also called a large language model, is going to be a foundational bit of tech — like Google — that everyone will use.
Today, it’s a great source of memes; tomorrow, some fear, it’s going to take your job. Already, companies are starting to adopt ChatGPT as a work aid, after Microsoft-backed OpenAI made the app available to the public in November. AI assistants are writing job descriptions for recruiters, lesson plans for teachers and sales pitches for marketers. The ability to chat to ChatGPT has become a job in itself, with entrepreneurs selling access to their “prompt Slack channels'', where you can pick up the latest hints.
ChatGPT’s success is attracting fresh attention to AI companies that have been operating in Europe for years — UnlikelyAI, Aleph Alpha, Sana Labs, Creative Fabrica and PolyAI among them. Many more startups are sprouting up, promising to disrupt everything from the legal system to the ad industry to media.
Early stage market map
Key facts
1bn+
Number of visits to ChatGPT in February; up 62.5% on January1
650m
Number of images used to train art generator tool Dall-E 22
$12bn+
cumulative fundraising of 550+ gen AI startups globally
Trends to watch
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Let me ChatGPT that for you
Text generation is the most crowded generative AI field, but there’s a big prize for startups to win here, as plenty of people hate writing.
ChatGPT is a great brainstorm buddy. Sure, it lacks nuance, critical thinking and ethical decision-making skills — but it can easily scribe formulaic content like advertising copy, cold outbound emails, corporate training, onboarding and bits of code.
AI is on the way to mastering all manner of work admin: meeting recaps, languages translated in real-time, to-do lists based on office conversations, transcripts and call summaries.
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Lawyering up
Copyright lawyers are going to be busy chasing money from AI-generated artwork that looks like it was based on human artists’ creations.
In another way, AI will be a powerful aid for the legal industry, which relies heavily on standardised documents. These docs are a) expensive and b) a pain to put together, so it’s easy to imagine a future where they’re handled by legal language models.
Auditing firm PwC estimates that the average Fortune 2000 company has between 20k and 40k active contracts. Robot lawyers may be key to managing the workload.
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Gen AI vs. the Brussels robo-cops
Will lawmakers clip generative AI’s wings? The EU is looking to more strictly regulate the use of AI, designating some of it as “high-risk”, binding developers to requirements of transparency, safety and oversight. In February, Italy’s Data Protection Agency stepped in to prevent AI chatbot Replika from using the personal data of its users.
EU rules have already shaped AI in Europe through the GDPR privacy law (to the detriment of the field, many founders argue). Big Tech firms recognise the risk of legislation. A recent investigation by transparency group Corporate Europe Observatory said industry players, including Microsoft and Google, had lobbied EU lawmakers to exclude AIs like ChatGPT from its crosshairs.
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Watch out for AI-washing
Generative AI has replaced Web3 and crypto as the next big things — perhaps mercifully. Now many founders are rushing to emphasise the importance of AI to their business models.
We’re likely going to be subjected to lots of AI systems that are not really AI systems — so it’s best to be wary of the uncritical pluggers popping up to promote the field.
Startups tracked by Sifted
Sifted take
Compared to another much-hyped bit of tech, the blockchain, generative AI’s certainly more understandable and — so far – fun (if it can steer clear of spreading harmful disinformation, that is). The bigger questions: will it replace people’s jobs, and what do roadmaps look like for generating returns? For as long as it shows a tendency to spout gibberish and confidently make some things up, humans will still be required to rein it in. But let’s go to the source: what does ChatGPT say about its own future? “Overall, it's important to approach the field with both excitement and caution,” the bot told Sifted.
Rising stars
Backed by the likes of Index Ventures, Kindred Capital and high-profile angels, it developed an AI-assisted platform for protein structure and sequence design.
Round
Seed
Valuation
Undisclosed
Date
2022
Size
€5,500,000
Builds on large language models offering products for wider AI adoption. Backed by Index Ventures, Y Combinator, Albion and LocalGlobe.
Round
Seed
Valuation
Undisclosed
Date
2022
Size
€2,350,000
A spinout from the University of Cambridge, it’s designed an AI data failure detection and correction platform to train models for computer vision teams.
Round
Seed
Valuation
Undisclosed
Date
2022
Size
€3,400,000
Early stage startups to watch
Aflorithmic Labs
Audio editing & generation
€2.5m
€570k
-
Aindo
Data practices
€2.9m
€2.8m
-
Aiva Technologies
Audio editing & generation
€2.3m
€1.5m
-
broadn
Education & training
-
-
-
Clickable
Text
Marketing
-
-
-
CopyMonkey.ai
Text
Marketing & SEO
€270k
€270k
-
Correcto.
Education & training
Languages
€7.6m
€7m
-
Cradle
Vision & 3D visuals
€5.5m
€5.5m
-
Creatext
Text
Marketing & SEO
€500k
€400k
-
DeepSearch Labs
AI research
€230k
€230k
-
Drafter AI
AI platforms
€40k
€40k
-
EdgeTier
AI assistants
€1.5m
€1.5m
-
Flawless (Limited)
Data practices
€900k
€900k
-
Flowrite
Text
Marketing & SEO
€4.5m
€4m
-
Fluento
Education & training
-
-
-
HeiTech Ltd (Hei.io)
Images & video editing
€150k
€100k
-
Humanloop
AI platforms
-
-
-
Hypertype
Text
Marketing & SEO
€1.5m
€1.2m
-
Inferex
AI platforms
€1.3m
€1.3m
-
jamie
Text
Transcripts
-
-
-
Kinetix
Vision & 3D visuals
Gaming
€10.5m
€10.5m
-
Kive
Images & video editing
€7.9m
€6.4m
-
Labelf AI
Data practices
€650k
€500k
-
LightOn
AI platforms
€3m
€3m
-
neuroflash
Content creation
€800k
€800k
-
Pathway (pathway.com)
Data practices
€4.1m
€4.1m
-
Qdrant
Data practices
€2m
€2m
-
Reface
Images & video editing
€5.5m
€5.5m
-
Stenography
Data practices
-
-
-
Surfer
Text
Marketing & SEO
-
-
-
Synthesys
Images & video editing
Marketing & SEO
-
-
-
Syntonym
Data practices
Synthetic data
€409k
€368k
-
Tenyks
AI platforms
€3.8m
€3.4m
-
TextCortex AI
Text
Marketing & SEO
€1.1m
€1.1m
-
Turing Intelligence Technology Limited
AI platforms
€4.6m
€3.6m
-
Twain
Text
Marketing & SEO
€4.4m
€2m
-
Unlikely AI
AI platforms
€19.5m
€18.2m
-
WordLift
Text
Marketing & SEO
€800k
€800k
-
Write with LAIKA ApS
Productivity
Transcripts
€250k
€250k
-
Yepic.ai
Images & video editing
€4m
€3m
€30m
YouMakr
Education & training
€200k
€150k
-
Zebracat
Images & video editing
Marketing & SEO
€425k
€425k
-
Sources
News articles
1 ChatGPT topped 1 Billion visits in February | March 2023 | Similarweb
3 Generative Tech Open Source Market Map | December 2022 | NFX
20 generative AI power players in Europe | February 2023 | Sifted
Why generative AI is getting VCs all excited | December 2022 | Sifted
Wise and Monzo founders back legal generative AI startup’s $10.5m Series A | February 2023 | Sifted
Europe’s OpenAI alumni | February 2023 | Sifted
Europe’s AI weaknesses could matter less in generative world, says Insight Partners | March 2023 | Sifted
Research reports
How to make money from generative AI | January 2023 | firstminute capital
2 Hierarchical Text-Conditional Image Generation with CLIP Latents | April 2022 | Research reports
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