AI Startup Roundup: SoftBank, Google, and New Investment Funds Fuel Innovation
The artificial intelligence landscape continues to accelerate, with significant investments and new ventures emerging across various sectors. Here’s a breakdown of the latest news.
SoftBank Leads Investment in Robotics Startup Skild AI
SoftBank is reportedly leading a $500 million investment round in Skild AI, a startup focused on developing general intelligence for robots. Unlike robots typically designed for limited tasks, Skild AI aims to create a “Skild brain,” a robotics foundation model adaptable to different hardware and tasks. The founders, Deepak Pathak and Abhinav Gupta, hail from Carnegie Mellon University. The startup previously raised $300 million in Series A funding, with backing from SoftBank, Sequoia, Menlo Ventures, and Bezos Expeditions.
Skild AI seeks to create a versatile brain for robots that can perform a variety of tasks.
“Our long-term goal is to develop artificial general intelligence (AGI) rooted in the physical world,” the startup said in a blog post.
Google Spins Out AI Biotech Startup Heritable Agriculture
Google is spinning off a research project from its X (moonshot) division into an independent AI biotech startup called Heritable Agriculture. This startup specializes in using advanced machine learning to revolutionize plant breeding, aiming to increase plant yields while improving sustainability. The technology allows for the “programmable” development of specific plant genomes. This enables farmers to breed crops with climate-friendly traits, including “higher yields, improved nutrition, better resilience to pathogen and climate stress, and faster seed breeding cycles at lower cost,” according to the startup. Furthermore, Heritable’s platform can accelerate the repopulation of deforested areas. The company has received funding from FTW Ventures, Mythos Ventures, SVG Ventures, and Google.
Indian Open-Source AI Lab Krutrim AI Labs Secures $230M Investment
Indian tech billionaire Bhavish Aggarwal is investing approximately $230 million into Krutrim AI Labs, the AI lab startup he founded. The lab, which Aggarwal describes as the country’s first frontier AI lab, has released Krutrim 2, the next version of its open-source large language model (LLM), along with vision, speech, and Indian-language embedding models. The lab also unveiled BharatBench, a global benchmark for the performance of Indian language models. Aggarwal plans to seek an additional $1.15 billion in investment. Aggarwal’s decision to create the AI lab stems from the unique challenges posed by India’s diverse languages and cultures when building general-purpose AI models, as he explained in a blog post. Furthermore, Krutrim AI Labs is collaborating with Nvidia to develop India’s largest supercomputer, slated to go live in March. The supercomputer will utilize Nvidia’s high-performance superchip, the GB200.
Cherry Ventures Launches $500M Fund for European Startups
Cherry Ventures, a venture capital firm with offices in Berlin, London, and Stockholm, has raised a $500 million investment fund to support European startups. The capital will be allocated to early-stage and later-stage companies. In a letter to startup founders, the firm stated, “We’re ready to fund the first trillion-dollar company in Europe.” Cherry Ventures aims to challenge the narrative that European tech innovation is struggling. The firm believes that Europe possesses world-class talent, technological research depth, and robust tech hubs. They emphasize the need for a shift in Europe’s innovation culture, stating “everything is up for grabs as the world transitions to new technologies and advancements in AI.” Cherry Ventures was founded in 2012 by Filip Dames and Christian Meerman and is led by former entrepreneurs and operators who have previously built companies, including Spotify, Uber, and Zalando.
