Loading summary
Transcript10 lines
- [00:01]
A
Today on the podcast, we want to talk about a continuation of our series where we're talking about companies that have raised a hundred million dollars in 2025. The top AI companies specifically. We're doing this for a couple different reasons, but we find it's, it's number one just really interesting to see, like, where the industry is. We do like a small profile on each company, try to give you an idea of what they're currently working on because this gives you a good idea of what industries are receiving funding, how they're receiving funding, who's giving them money. I think this is just, it's a pretty eye opening. It's a pretty eye opening series. We love doing it, so we hope you enjoy it. We're going to start with all of the companies that raised over a hundred million dollars in March of this year. But before we do that, Jamie, why don't you tell them about our AI Hustle school community?
- [00:46]
B
Yeah. If you've ever wanted to learn how to grow your business with AI, get a, you know, an unfair competitive advantage amongst others, or even just make money on the side using AI, you should definitely check out our school community called AI Hustle. Each week we release bonus content over there, sharing exact strategies with how we are growing our own businesses and making money with AI. So this past week we did one with Jayden. He talked about a special way he is making AI podcasts and having it sound natural and not like a robot voice. So there's just tons of different content. We do things about being an AI hustle, sorry, an AI consultant, you know, growing, making content, marketing, all that kind of stuff. So if that interests you, you should definitely check it out. You can lock in our price of 19amonth. That's a holiday special. It's normally more money than that, but you can lock that price in forever if you join today. So go check that out. But yeah, let's get into March, starting with number one. This one is a very obvious one, but OpenAI raised $40 billion in March, which is absolute insanity, but to be expected.
- [01:55]
A
Yeah, I love how the whole list we like go through and we're like, this company raised like 105 million. This one raised like 200 million. Oh, my gosh. OpenAI $40 billion just in March. They've raised so much money, it's insane. So that valued them at 300 billion. It was led by SoftBank. So it's kind of interesting because the bigger these rounds get, the bigger the players come in. When you have SoftBank coming in, you Know you're, you know you're, you mean business. They also had Thrive Capital, they had Microsoft, they have CO2, all of those. So they had the big boys, they brought out the big guns. And $40 billion later we have OpenAI who still has not achieved AGI, but we'll forgive them because their models are, you know, generally pretty good, I guess for sure.
- [02:43]
B
And that puts their valuation at 300 billion as of March. So pretty, pretty insane valuation. But like you said, they're on top. So next in March we have Next Hop AI, which is another AI infrastructure company. So they had, they raised a Series A round led by Lightspeed ventures for a $110 million raise. So they also included Kleiner Perkins Battery Ventures, Emergent Ventures and some others. So another AI infrastructure company, like I said before, that's going to be, that's going to be a huge industry moving forward.
- [03:22]
A
Yep, yep, that's going to be massive. Okay, next up we have Cambridge, Massachusetts based Il Silco Medicine. They raised $110 million. There's a lot of players that have been in this space this year that I'm really excited about, but they're using AI for AI powered drug discovery. They announces this is their Series E. So they've been doing this for a little while. The company's valued at $1 billion. It was co led by Value Partners and Pudong Chowtong to out of China. And so it's kind of interesting. There is a, there's obviously a lot of money to be made in drug discovery. What I find is when some of these drug discovery companies are raising money, it's because they've usually, usually made some sort of breakthrough and they, they want more money. And people are interested in investing because they feel like they're getting close to discovering some drugs or they have a breakthrough process for the disc. We've seen a lot of interesting players here. This hundred million dollars is interesting. We've seen two different things. One where a company like this is going to use AI to help them come up with concepts for drugs. Another one where they help them test like a lot of drugs. And then some interesting ones where they actually use robots to mix chemicals that they wouldn't necessarily want humans to do, or maybe they do them faster than humans. The AI comes up with like chemical compound mixture ideas. They have a robot do the actual mixing. They have an AI and analyze it. So there's like some really interesting stuff happening with AI drug discovery. So this will be an exciting one to keep following in the future.
- [04:59]
B
Yeah, that Whole concept, like, totally blows my mind. I was a chemistry minor in college and so, like the whole idea of it, of AI doing drug discovery is just totally crazy. I would love to chat for, you know, an hour with someone in that industry. It's. That's totally, totally super cool. So we got another AI infrastructure company next called Celestial AI. They raised $250 million in their series C round that valued them at 2.5 billion with a B on March 11th. So this round was raised or led by Fidelity with participation from Tiger Global, BlackRock and Intel CEO Lip Bhutan, among others. So another AI infrastructure company, and I.
- [05:43]
A
Will say for those curious, they actually have just completed a merger. So the update on them is that they've merged with a company called Marvel or, I mean, got acquired basically. But it's going to help scale up connectivity for the next generation of data centers. This is kind of where they're specifically focusing on. So this is interesting, right? This is a company that was able to raise a lot of money. They raised $250 million. They were then acquired. Obviously this is a company that had massive backers. Tiger blackrock, intel CEO, you know, Fidelity, like all the, all the big banky kind of people were in on this deal. And so getting acquired is no shocker. And I think that the acquisition probably paid out nicely for their investors. So congratulations to everyone over at Celestial AI. The merger was just announced December 2nd of this year. So they were able to get this deal done March 11th and by the end of the year, get acquired.
- [06:40]
B
Yeah. So next on the list we have Lilia sciences, which raised $200 million in their seed round as it looks to create Science super intelligence platform. So it's kind of a generic idea. I'm not exactly sure what they're going for, but I do know moving forward, having specific use cases for different AI programs will become more and more necessary. For example, we talked about the medical AI has a very specific skill set and specific data it needs to train on. So I'm guessing it's something along those lines where it's more science focused. Jane, have you heard anything about this company?
- [07:17]
A
Yeah, I think this is one of those autonomous companies that I was telling you about before or we're talking about before. So they said we are introducing the world's first scientific superintelligence platform and autonomous labs for life, chemical and material sciences to rapidly expand human knowledge and push the limits of whatever their tagline. But basically it's autonomous chemical and material sciences. So it will have like the robotics element to it. I think whether you have like the AI and robots mixing chemicals, doing a lot of these experiments and figuring stuff out. They have a really cool video on their website where they have like these little, I mean it's like machines, but it's kind of these robots picking up vials and moving stuff around. So it's, it's kind of mixing the robotics and the, and the AI for decision making together to help come up with new drug discovery stuff and, and other things in, in material sciences.
- [08:16]
B
Very cool. Very cool. Well, hey, March had a lot of, in a lot of different companies that raised over $100 million. We're going to continue that list next time, but in the meantime, we appreciate you listening. Thanks for listening. If you would leave us a rating or review wherever you are listening, we would really appreciate it. It helps us reach more people. And again, check out the AI Hustle school community. If you want to grow your business or make money on the side using AI, we would love to have you be a part of it. Thanks for listening and we'll see you next time.