AI Startups: 3 Companies Collectively Raise $2.3 Billion

What happens when three AI startups walk into a room? They walk out with a fortune.

Startups in robotics and cloud artificial intelligence (AI) have collectively raised $2.3 billion, dominated by Figure, which makes humanoid robots for home and business.

Figure, backed by OpenAI, Nvidia and Microsoft, reportedly is in talks to raise $1.5 billion in a Series C funding round. Last week, the robotics AI startup unveiled Helix AI, a vision, language and movement model that powers its humanoid robots. Its robots were shown putting away groceries despite not being specifically trained on these food items.

Meanwhile, cloud AI startup Lambda said it has raised $480 million to build a hyperscaler cloud for AI developers and end users.

“Lambda’s mission is to build the world’s largest AI cloud and accelerate human progress,” Stephen Balaban, co-founder and CEO of Lambda, said in a video address on its website.

Lambda is building the underlying infrastructure for AI workloads to make more GPUs available to customers and also the software layer atop it.

The Series D round was co-led by Andra Capital and SGW, with participation from OpenAI Co-founder Andrej Karpathy, ARK Invest, Fincadia Capital Partners, G Squared, In-Q-Tel (IQT), KHK & Partners, Nvidia and others.

Lambda also received strategic investments from Pegatron, Supermicro, Wistron and Wiwynn, and additional participation from existing investors including 1517, Crescent Cove and USIT.

Completing the trio is Together.ai, which raised $305 million in a Series B round. Together.ai is also building an AI cloud for AI applications using open-source models and training custom models. The startup said it has an upcoming deployment of Nvidia’s Blackwell GPUs in data centers.

The round was led by General Catalyst and Prosperity7. Other participants include Salesforce Ventures, DAMAC Capital, Nvidia, Kleiner Perkins, March Capital, Emergence Capital, Lux Capital, SE Ventures, Greycroft, Coatue, Definition, Cadenza Ventures, Long Journey Ventures, Brave Capital, Scott Banister, SK Telecom and former Cisco CEO John Chambers.

“This investment will accelerate our mission to make open source AI accessible to developers and enterprises globally,” the startup said.

DeepMind Scientist’s Lab, Thiel-Backed Startup

A former senior research scientist for Google DeepMind who worked on its Nobel Prize-winning protein prediction system, AlphaFold 2, has founded his own startup.

Simon Kohl, who co-led DeepMind’s protein design team, started Latent Labs to build AI foundation models to make biology programmable.

AlphaFold 2 predicted the structure of proteins and solved a half-century challenge in biology. Latent Labs wants to use generative AI to design proteins from scratch.

Its researchers are computationally creating new therapeutic molecules such as antibodies or enzymes, in a bid to accelerate personalized medicine, or treatments specifically tailored to the patient.

The lab also aims to enable custom designs of proteins, such as making them more stable, to speed up drug development.

The startup emerged from stealth with $50 million in total funding — $40 million was from a Series A round led by Radical Ventures and Sofinnova Partners, with the participation of Flying Fish, Isomer and existing investors 8VC, Kindred Capital and Pillar VC.

Angel investors include Google Chief Scientist Jeff Dean, Transformer architecture inventor and Cohere founder Aidan Gomez, and ElevenLabs founder Mati Staniszewski.

The lab did not disclose the source of the remaining $10 million in seed money.

In other news, AI recruiting startup Mercor has reportedly raised $100 million in a Series B round. Founded by former Thiel Fellows, the startup spotted growing demand for AI staff and created a streamlined hiring process. Employers upload job descriptions and Mercor recommends candidates.

Felicis led the round, with participation from Benchmark and General Catalyst, DST Global and Menlo Ventures.

Mercor said it works with OpenAI and other top artificial intelligence labs.