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My First 16: Competing in a Crowd of Incumbents with Mercury’s Immad Akhund

Andreessen Horowitz

In this episode, a16z partner Seema Amble talks with co-founder and CEO of Mercury Immad Akhund about the idea of a minimum delightful product in fintech, doing the spreadsheet math on unit economics early on, and how to compete in a category already filled with incumbents. But we were kind of testing it with some real customers.

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Galileo emerges from stealth to streamline AI model development

TechCrunch

After all, AI is costly — Gartner predicted in 2021 that a third of tech providers would invest $1 million or more in AI by 2023 — and debugging an algorithm gone wrong threatens to inflate the development budget. ” Chatterji has a background in data science, having worked at Google for three years at Google AI.

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Every time OpenAI cuts a check for training data, an unlaunched competitive startup dies. Without a ‘safe harbor,’ AI will be ruled by incumbents.

Hunter Walk

Start with something like, “For the next 12 months any developer of AI models would be protected from legal liability so long as they abide by certain evolving standards.” In the last year we’ve seen billions of dollars invested in AI companies. As I wrote in April 2023 , “What would an AI Safe Harbor look like?

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AI-powered supply chain startup Pando lands $30M investment

TechCrunch

Signaling that investments in the supply chain sector remain robust, Pando , a startup developing fulfillment management technologies, today announced that it raised $30 million in a Series B round, bringing its total raised to $45 million. Customers can customize the tools and apps or build their own using Pando’s APIs.

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Lowercarbon Capital and Gradient Ventures Invest $9M in Quilt for Advanced Residential Heat Pump System

American Entrepreneurship

Quilt has developed a highly efficient electric heat pump system that is controlled through a first-of-its-kind integrated software platform. However, most heat pump systems today are more difficult to use than their more mature fossil incumbents. We’re developing heat pumps that are better than any HVAC system of any kind.

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SG’s Equatorial Space bags $1.5m in Seed funding

AsiaTechDaily

The company’s aim is to enable space access at greatly reduced risk, cost, and environmental impact compared to incumbent solutions. The funding will be used to develop Equatorial Space Systems’s Dorado commercial-sounding rocket family. The round was also joined by SEEDS Capital and Masik Enterprises.

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After raising $10M, Breeze breathes fresh air into a stagnant disability insurance market

TechCrunch

Breeze raised $10 million in Series A funding in a round led by Link Ventures that Nabity boasts is the “largest first round of institutional capital ever invested in a Nebraska-based software startup.” Northwestern Mutual Ventures, Silicon Valley Bank, M25, Fiat Ventures and Invest Nebraska also participated in the financing.