Private Markets

June 20, 2023

Money Continues Flowing Into AI Startups

While these were just three deals announced today, a significant appetite remains for artificial intelligence (AI)-related companies in public and private markets. For example, one company raised $113 million last week, despite being founded a month ago and having no product. 😮

Nonetheless, let’s recap today’s deals:

Parrot, an AI-powered transcription platform, raised an $11 million Series A round. The transcription platform offers speech-to-text depositions for the legal and insurance industry, also unveiling a new feature to summarize depositions within seconds.

Amplify Partners and XYZ Venture Capital co-led the round at an undisclosed valuation, bringing its total raised to $14 million. The company will use the proceeds to continue investing in AI for the legal and insurance domains, developing tools to address the industries’ core challenges. 🦜

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The voice-generating platform ElevenLabs raised a $19 million Series A round. The round was co-led by Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross, alongside Andreessen Horowitz, and gives the company a post-money valuation of $99 million.

The company’s technology turns text into speech using synthetic voices, cloned voices, or entirely novel “artificial” voices that mimic the sounds of people of various backgrounds. They’re also language-agnostic, meaning customers can fine-tune them and build proprietary speech models on top of it. Overall, the investment will continue building ElevenLab’s research hub for voice AI and launch additional products to support market verticals like publishing, gaming, entertainment, and conversational applications. 🤖

JPMorgan Chase made a strategic investment in Cleareye.ai. The fintech firm claims its platform can expedite trade finance processes and compliance by analyzing documents and data, reducing the need for manual checks.

The two did not disclose the financial terms of the investment, but it builds on a commercial relationship that began last year. JPMorgan receives 4 million documents yearly related to its trade finance business, so it’s leveraging Cleareye.ai’s tech to improve its back-office operations. 📝

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December 21, 2023

C-Letter Companies’ Great Day

It’s a slower week in the markets, so it was slightly interesting that all of today’s top earnings movers seemed to start with the letter C. Let’s quickly recap their results. 👍

First up is Carnival Cruises, which reported another quarter of record results. The company’s adjusted loss per share of $0.07 beat expectations for a $0.13 loss, while a revenue jump of 40.60% to $5.397 billion topped the expected $5.295 billion. That was driven by a 54.70% increase in passenger-ticket revenue ($35.10 billion) and a 20.10% jump in other revenue ($1.886 billion). 🛳️

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Samsung Slashes Profit Expectations

Shares of Samsung Electronics fell today after the consumer electronics giant warned about its fourth-quarter results. It now expects a 35% YoY decline in operating profit during the fourth quarter of 2023, coming in at 2.8 trillion South Korean won vs. 4.31 trillion a year ago. 🔻

Given it is the country’s largest company and the world’s largest maker of dynamic random-access memory chips, analysts closely watch it as a bellwether for the consumer electronics industry. 👀

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Private Markets

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All Eyes on PE 🔎 KKR Raises $5 Billion for New Fund

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KKR, formerly known as Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co, is a private equity GIANT. We’re talking roughly 280 private equity investments worth $545 billion. The firm’s new fund for mid-size companies, called ‘Ascendant,’ will target a variety of sectors, including financial services, healthcare, industrials, consumer, technology, media and telecommunications. 

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Neumann’s New Hustle

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