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- [00:01]
A
Welcome back to the podcast. Today we are continuing our list of top companies who raised over $100 million in the past year with their AI technology. So we're going to continue the list. Before we do, Jayden, why don't you tell them about our school community?
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B
Yeah. Every single week, Jamie and I record a bonus piece of content that we post over on our school community. So we're breaking down all of the AI tools, tactics and techniques we're using to grow and scale our businesses. And we show you how to do that. We, we show you a whole bunch of different side hustles that we're doing, how you can do them to make money with AI or to grow and scale your business with AI. So there's a couple things there. You get new ideas and you get ideas for inside of your company. We are basically sharing everything that we don't share publicly. How much money we make, how much revenue it's generating, what it costs to use a lot of these tools, why I'm spending over a thousand dollars a month on 11 Labs credits, which sounds like insanity, but has some amazing ROI. If you're interested in any of that, go check it out. It's $19 a month. It's a Christmas discount right now. So it's $19 a month for the Christmas discount. The price goes up in the future. We've had it much higher in the past. It's been $100 a month in the past. So it's discounted right now. And if you get it at $19 a month, it won't ever be raised on you. So you go lock it in. Thanks so much for. Yeah, we'd love to have you in the community. It'd be awesome. Let's talk about the top companies that have raised over a hundred million dollars this year, which is phenomenal. So like Jamie mentioned, the first one we want to talk about is called Sandbox aq. So they just closed a Series E where they had the company valued at $5.7 billion. They raised $450 million. That is a lot of money. They got the money from Nvidia, Google, Bridgewater Associates, which is, they also had De Ralio, or, sorry, Ray Dalio that invested in this. So a lot of big players, a ton of money. Sandboxaq was one of the, I think one of the bigger ones that happened in, in April. And it's funny because it's, it's like not one that is super known and you know, the most well known one, but basically it is a partner or basically they partner with a lot of companies. One thing that they're highlighting on their website is that they have partnered with the DAO for AI and post quantum cryptography defense. So if you're wondering what they do, they do post quantum cryptography defense. Basically. Once quantum computing takes over and quantum computers can crack all of your cryptography, what are you going to do? You're going to go to sandboxaq and you're going to work with them and they'll make it so that even the quantum computers can't crack into your secure environments, into your encrypted, you know, messages. This is really important for everything in finance. Also, they're working with Bahrain's sovereign fund. They signed a deal to speed up drug discovery with them. So it feels like they're kind of like all over the place doing a whole bunch of big things with big companies and big people. But it's not like a company that I think most people, if you like or like, hey, do you know sandboxaq? I don't think most people recognize that name. Unless, of course, you're Bahrain's sovereign fund or you're the DAW and you're worried about cryptography. So. Interesting company.
- [03:15]
A
Yeah, I've never heard of them, but yeah, that sounds like they do some really important work over there. So pretty cool. Definitely one to keep your eye on. Hey, next is Runway, which we've talked about quite a bit on this podcast. But they are a AI video generation company, a really good one at that. They raised $308 million in April in their Series D round that valued the company at $3 billion. So that was led by General Atlantic, SoftBank, Nvidia and Fidelity. So Runways are really just a great, a great program. They kind of fell off, at least in the news a little bit for a while because OpenAI released Sora and just really kind of competed in a big way. But Runway is, I feel like, more cinematic. Could definitely be more used in Hollywood, just with their color, grading, lighting, things like that. They're, they're, they're really, they are doing things a little bit differently than, than OpenAI and Sora. Just a really, really great company. So definitely one to keep in, in your back, your head.
- [04:15]
B
Yeah, it's interesting. They have, like, if you go to their website, they'll, they'll highlight a bunch of people that they have worked with. They've worked with Under Armour to power some of their TV commercials. So the footage from their TV commercials is AI generated. They've also worked with the History Channel to to help with some of their footage. Sometimes it's really hard to get footage from maybe something that happened a long time ago in history. There is no video of it. And so you, I mean, you could go use special effects, but using one of these AI models is the best way to, to get some of that. And then they also worked with the TV show that is on Amazon called House of David. That TV show used it to help create scenes inside of their. Inside of their TV show. So they're helping with a lot of different places. Like you mentioned, Jamie, it's like less like, you know, Sora, where everyone wants to just create little like goofy videos. And it's like being used by big Hollywood firms and big companies. So no shocker that they were able to raise $308 million at a $3 billion valuation. And of course they had Nvidia who put some money in there because Nvidia sells them chips and wants their money back. And they know that if they give it to Runway, they're going to get their money back. So great company. All right, moving on to May. A huge company that I have talked to before is called Snorkel AI. I actually first met Snorkel AI at I think a trade show, an AI trade show a couple years ago. Big company. They're a data labeling startup. They raised $100 million. It was their Series D that valued them at $1.3 billion. And they had Lightspeed Ventures, Greylock Prosperity 7 Ventures, a bunch of big players that were investing into this. One thing that's interesting about Snorkel AI to me is some of these data labeling companies are making insane amounts of money. You saw Scale AI get acquired for, you know, a multi billion dollar deal. When Zuckerberg acquired their company that he took their CEO made him as like head of AI over at Meta. So Snorkel AI feels like it's kind of filling in some of the gaps because after that happened, OpenAI and Google both were like, we're not going to use Scale AI anymore because Meta now controls it and we don't want to give our money to Meta, even though like Scale AI has a ton of really good labeled data. And so I guess they're a loss, perhaps, I don't know. But in any case, Snorkel AI is making a lot of money here doing, doing something very similar.
- [06:35]
A
Very cool, very cool. The next one on the list is called Lmarena LMA arena, popular community driven benchmarking tool for AI models. So they raised $100 million in a seed round that valued the company at $600 million. So what's crazy to me about this is that it's just a benchmarking tool to, like, kind of measure parameters and the power, power of the AI, but they themselves raised $100 million. So, Jaden, like, how, how in this world, how does that happen? Or like, what's the value there in making good AI benchmarking tools?
- [07:12]
B
So the thing that I love about LM arena is basically anytime a new AI model gets released, they always quote how they did on Ella Marina. It's basically the number one benchmark. And the reason why it's the number one benchmark is because what you do on it is you can you just use it like you would use ChatGPT. You, you know, you tell, say, tell me a joke and it's going to give you two responses side by side, and you just pick which one you like better. And so you get to use AI for free. That's super nice. And then you get two responses. So you get double, double, whatever, and you pick which one's better. But then what happens is they publish these reports where, like, they don't tell you which AI model is, is which one. You just tell them which one you like better. And so anytime OpenAI or Anthropic or Google Gemini are coming up with a new model, they'll release the new model incognito to LM Arena. So no one knows what it is. And if that model does really good on LM arena, then the AI model company knows that they should launch it. So when you see like, oh, there's a new. And they give them code names, right? It's like, oh, I think before the, you know, like before Nano Banana got released, they had like a codename Banana model that was like, doing really good on Ella Marina. And everyone's like, oh, my gosh, why is the Banana model crushing everybody? What is this mystical Banana model? And it's like, turns out it's Nano Banana. And so this, this basically happens where there's like these. A new crazy incognito model will pop up on LL Marina. Everybody's like, wow, why is it so much better than everything else? The reason why I like this versus other benchmarks, people will be like, oh, but like, on a software engineering benchmark, OpenAI is better than like anthropic. But like, if you ask software engineers, they always would prefer anthropic. I like this because it's a blind test and sometimes you can kind of game the, the benchmarks where you're like, yeah, we answered like x amount of questions right on this benchmark. And sometimes it's like you can, you can like train your model on the questions in the benchmark. There's sneaky ways. OpenAI, Google anthropic. All of them are guilty of this. The one that feels like you cannot game it is LM arena because it's basically you get two responses side by side, you pick which one you prefer and all of a sudden like that's going to be the top model on LM arena and if you can make a new model, put it out and all of a sudden it's, it's being ranked as like the best responses. It's just a blind test. It's super, super trusted and safe and people are actually picking that. So long rant over. Ella Marina is awesome.
- [09:36]
A
Well, hey, yeah, thanks for explaining that. That clears it up a lot for me. So thank you. And hey, if you listened to this episode and you got any value out of it, we would love a rating or review wherever you are listening or watching. We really appreciate those and they help us reach more people. And again, check out the AI Hustle school community if you want to get unfair advantage in growing your business or making money using AI. Thanks for listening and we'll see you next time.