AI Startup News: SoftBank, Google and a New Startup Fund

SoftBank reportedly is leading a $500 million investment round in Skild AI, a startup developing general intelligence for robots that can be adapted to perform different tasks. Typically, robots are trained to do limited tasks.

The startup developed what it calls the Skild brain, which is a robotics foundation model that is scalable and adaptable across hardware and tasks, from opening the fridge to loading the dishwasher and using a computer.

Skild AI was founded by two professors from Carnegie Mellon University, Deepak Pathak and Abhinav Gupta. Last July, it raised $300 million in Series A funding, whose investors include SoftBank, Sequoia, Menlo Ventures and Bezos Expeditions, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ family office.

“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 Off AI Biotech Startup

Google is spinning out one of the research projects in its X (moonshot) division into an independent artificial intelligence (AI) biotech startup, according to a company blog post.

Called Heritable Agriculture, the startup aims to increase plant yields while optimizing for sustainability by revolutionizing plant breeding using advanced machine learning. It said it is making plants “programmable.”

The startup’s technology can help it identify and understand the function of specific genomes in plants. The result is the ability of farmers to breed crops with climate-friendly traits that come with “higher yields, improved nutrition, better resilience to pathogen and climate stress, and faster seed breeding cycles at lower cost,” the startup said.

Moreover, the startup’s platform can improve the health and resilience of trees 400 times faster than current processes, which can accelerate the repopulation of deforested areas.

Heritable received funding from FTW Ventures, Mythos Ventures and SVG Ventures. Google reportedly also invested in the startup. The amount of capital raised for the seed round was not disclosed.

Indian Open-Source AI Lab Snags $230M

Indian tech billionaire Bhavish Aggarwal is investing 2,000 crore rupees, or about $230 million, into the AI lab startup he founded, according to a post on X. He said it is the country’s first frontier AI lab.

The startup, Krutrim AI Labs, also released the next version of its open-source large language model (LLM), Krutrim 2, as well as vision, speech and Indian-language embedding models. It unveiled BharatBench, a global benchmark for Indian language model performance.

Aggarwal reportedly will be seeking $1.15 billion in additional investment.

Aggarwal decided to create the AI lab because “the plurality of Indian languages and culture poses unique challenges in building general purpose AI models for India,” he wrote in a blog post.

Krutrim AI Labs also partnered with Nvidia to develop the country’s largest supercomputer, which will go live in March. The supercomputer will use Nvidia’s high-performance superchip called GB200.

Cherry Ventures Launches $500M Fund

Cherry Ventures, a venture capital firm based in Berlin, London and Stockholm, has raised $500 million in a new investment fund to support European startups. The capital will be split between early state startups and later-stage companies.

“We’re ready to fund the first trillion-dollar company in Europe,” the company said in a letter to startup founders.

Cherry said it wants to defy the “current narrative” about European tech innovation as “all doom and gloom. Europe is flailing. Venture is tough. The U.S. is way ahead. Europe isn’t the place for builders.”

The VC firm said “we don’t buy it.” Instead, it believes “everything is up for grabs as the world transitions to new technologies and advancements in AI.”

It said Europe has world-class talent, research depth in technology and robust tech hubs. But “our culture of innovation must change.”

Cherry, founded in 2012 by Filip Dames and Christian Meerman, is led by former entrepreneurs and operators who have built companies such as Spotify, Uber and Zalando.