Loading summary
Transcript14 lines
- [00:00]
A
Welcome back to the podcast. Today we are continuing our list of companies in 2025 who have raised over $100 million. And there's a bunch of them. We're doing this so you guys can stay informed as to the top AI companies. Kind of get just an overview of where the industry is going and some of the top players. So let's dive right in. Before I do, Jayn, why don't you tell them about our school community?
- [00:21]
B
Yeah. So every single week, Jamie and I cover a new tool, technique, strategy, strategy that we're currently using in our businesses to grow and scale them using AI. Recently, we've done a number of episodes on becoming an AI consultant. How much I'm personally charging per hour, you get the actual number? I don't, I don't publish this anywhere because the number is growing. But we cover that in a recent video talking about how to land clients as an AI consultant, how much you can charge, the types of things that you should cover in those calls, and how to structure that. So if you're interested in becoming an AI consultant in your industry and wonder how to get started with that, it is very lucrative. Go check out the AI Hustle school community among a hundred other videos detailing tools, strategies, techniques for growing and scaling your business using AI. It's $19 a month. We have a holiday Christmas discount right now. If you want to get the Christmas discount and lock in $19 a month, it won't be raised on you in the future when the price goes up, but you can get that discount if you use it now. The link is in the description. All right, let's talk about the first company here, which is Reflection AI. They're trying to build a super intelligent autonomous system. We'll get into more of what that means. Jamie, why don't you tell about, tell us about how much they raised and who they got money from.
- [01:37]
A
Yeah, so they raised $130 million in their series A round that values their company at 580 million, but it's only a one year old company, so that is, that's pretty impressive. The round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and crv. So. But again, that whole description is a little bit vague, if you will. I would love to hear more about what they do. I suspect some of these companies on this list maybe are trying to get government contracts. That's the one thing it never says when we're talking about these companies raising over a hundred million is who's getting the government contracts and why. You know, so, but have you, have you heard at all about what this company does at Reflection.
- [02:18]
B
This is an interesting one. So basically it's just a research lab. They don't have any product that has come out yet. If you go to their website, it's very blank. It basically has a picture of two people smiling, looking at a computer. And the only thing that is on their homepage it says, building Frontier Open Intelligence. We're making Frontier Open Intelligence and making it accessible to all. Then you can go look at their research and stuff. But basically this is a research lab and this. What's, what's interesting is there's a number of other players that are doing the same thing. You have Ilya Ceskever with Super Safe Intelligence, who's raised a billion dollars. You have Miriam Moratti with I think, Thinking Human Labs.
- [02:52]
A
Am I, I think that's right, yeah, she has.
- [02:54]
B
She's also Machine Labs. Oh my gosh. Why can't I think of Myria Labs?
- [02:57]
A
Thinking Machine. Yeah, yeah, Thinking Machine.
- [02:59]
B
Thank you. Oh my gosh. So. So we have like a bunch of these labs that have no product. They're working on specific things and Reflection AI is one of them. Now, they're obviously very talented. They've raised a lot of money have. And they haven't raised it from random people. It's from like Lightspeed and CRV. So they're 1 years old. They've been able to raise $130 million. They have some exciting stuff in the pipe, but it hasn't been released yet. So we're all holding our breath to see when this comes out. They raised this money back in March and we have yet to see the product come out. So will they release something maybe this March on their one year anniversary? Time will tell. But it's interesting to see that some of these research funds or some of these research organizations are also raising massive amounts of money. Without a clear product that's open, they're sort of still in stealth. So their investors probably know, but we just don't know.
- [03:49]
A
Very interesting. Anyways, next on the list is a coding startup called Turning or Turing. They closed a Series e round on March 7th that valued the startup at $2.2 billion. So in that round they raised $111 million. So led by Kazana Nasional, with participation from Westbridge Capital, Granules and Sozo Ventures, among others. So another really interesting, you know, industry that we haven't really covered yet in this list and that is the coding coding industry under AI. So Jane, have you heard about Turing at all or are they, are they Partnered.
- [04:29]
B
This is interesting. Yeah, I think. I think I covered this on my show, AI Chat, back in March. But, um, essentially what they're doing is they are helping to improve the accuracy of LLMs and apps that are built on top of them. So it's. It's kind of like an accuracy detection or checker that you can run if you have, you know, chat GPT giving you a response. This will check it for accuracy. They do this in an interesting way. They have a whole bunch of engineers that contribute code to AI projects, and they're also helping build LLMs for OpenAI and a bunch of other players. So it's like they have contracts with OpenAI and some of these other major players to help improve the quality of. The quality of the output from the LLM. Because of that, they actually have $300 million in annual recurring revenue back in March. I'm sure it's higher today. So, like, you know, they're working as a contractor, as a company that works for, like, OpenAI to make the models better. They have a very specific niche kind of expertise. And someone like OpenAI or Gemini or Anthropic, it's like, look, if we can make your model 10, 20, 30% better, would you pay us $100 million? And in most cases, the answer is yes. And so, yeah, they have $100 million in annual recurring revenue. They just secured $11 million, which put them at a $2.2 billion valuation. And I think the last round that they did had them priced at $167 million. So that means they're growing really fast, they're very profitable. And, you know, I think today they work with 4 million coders around the world. So when they say they have an army of coders that are contributing code and helping make these models better, they literally have an army of coders. 4 million is pretty impressive.
- [06:10]
A
Crazy. Crazy. The next one we have actually is a defense company that I. I was saying, who get. Who gets the government contracts? Shield AI, an AI defense tech startup, raised $240 million in their Series F round that closed on March 6th. So the round is led by L3Harris Technologies and Hanwha Aerospace, in participation from Andreessen Horowitz and the US Innovation Technology Fund, among others. So their company is now valued at 5.3 billion. But when you talk about defense and AI, I feel like there's got to be a crazy amount of money and also opportunity for government contracts.
- [06:52]
B
Uh, that'll be really.
- [06:53]
A
I. I'd like to learn more about that one as well as the, you know, medical discovery industries. But SHIELD AI definitely want to keep your eye on.
- [07:01]
B
Yes. And I want to give you a couple examples of things that they've worked on because this is a, a pretty interesting company. They said Shield AI enabled the X62 Vista to fly, autonomously fly and perform tactical maneuvers against human pilots. So that's one thing that they do. Another thing, when it came to General Atomics Aeronautical, they said hive minds successfully flew an MQ20 Avenger, leveraging some autonomy, government reference architecture compliant interfaces. One other thing they did is it said Shield AI conducted dual ship autonomy tests using Kratos MQM178 fire jet drones. So yeah, they are in defense. They're working directly with. Well, what's interesting is I think they're working directly with like, like hardware that already exists, like fighter jets or other things that already exist and they're putting their technology into them. So in the case of, you know, like the X62 Vista, they autonomously flew that and they were, you know, testing tactical maneuvers against human pilots with an AI flying the, flying it. So it's very, very interesting. Obviously this is worth a lot of money if you can get humans out of defense, out of, out of flying. Saves lives and I mean probably takes lives. It's all the giant, it's, I guess it's all the military industrial complex. So I don't know how, how noble 100% it is, but I mean if China's attacking me, I want SHIELD AI to fly the jets against them to protect me. So it's a, it's a wild world. All right. Another one that's really interesting is of course we'll end this episode on one of the other big players that is no shock to anyone and that is Anthropic, right. This is one of the biggest investor, you know, companies that has raised the most money this year after OpenAI, they raised $3.5 billion in their series E. That that round valued them at $61 billion. They announced it in March. It was led by Lightspeed. I think I've already covered, we've already covered the story. How Lightspeed put the money in I basically think is because they wanted Anthropic's logo on their website. So they gave them a billion dollars in, in this. Actually, you know what, that was even more recent. In September they put more in. So Lightspeed's been putting money into Anthropic for a long time. The logo is strong on Lightspeed's website. And I mean it's no shocker. They're growing very fast. They also had Salesforce Ventures, Menlo Ventures, General Catalyst. All of those were putting money into Anthropic. We don't need to do that much of a, I guess a summary on what the heck Anthropic does. It owns Claude, which is the number one coding AI tool that all developers love. They have Claude Code, which we use over at AI Box AI. My startup lets you test all the different AI models against each other. Claude Code basically does all of our coding for us. Our developers use it for everything and saves us a ton of time and money. And Anthropic is the company behind that. So an amazing company for sure. Listen, thank you so much for tuning into the podcast today. If you learned about any new companies you hadn't heard of before, about any of the use cases that seem interesting in AI and defense and other areas, make sure to leave a rating review on the podcast. It helps our show out a ton to get found by more amazing people like yourself. And as always, make sure to go check out the AI Hustle School community. We'll leave a link in the description to that.