PitchBook’s Emerging Technology Indicator (ETI) report issues a thorough analysis of the most exciting and disruptive technologies pushing growth opportunities, tracking a limited set of startups receiving seed and early-stage investment from top VC firms.
Throughout the report, ETI deals will refer to investment deals from top VC firms into disruptive seed or early-stage companies.
Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (AI & ML) startups raised a total of $554 million in Q2 2022 across 11 deals, amounting to one of the largest quarters for the sector in recent years, according to PitchBook records.
This boost in deal value was driven by a single huge deal, the $265 million Series A round raised for Inflection, a company started up by the founders of LinkedIn and Google’s DeepMind and centered on improving how humans communicate with computers.
Adept, a company also started by ex-Google employees, raised the second-largest investment with a $65 million Series A round, and has a similar aim to Inflection, using AI to create a general intelligence platform that can automate any kind of software.
Other startups across the sector are centered around a broad range of exciting opportunities within the AI & ML space including categories such as data preparation, with Heartex raising a $25 million Series A round, model development, with Lightning AI raising a $40 million Series B round, Modular raising $30 million in a seed round and Predibase raising $16 million in a Series A round, and finally, enterprise prediction tools, with Kumo.ai raising a $19 million Series A round.
While the use of enterprise AI expands across the market, startups are beginning to also focus on the operational aspects of the organising and running AI applications, with particular focus on monitoring platforms for machine learning operations teams, evident by Truera, which raised a $25 million Series B round and Gantry which raised a $24 million Series A round.
There has also been a notable focus on compute resource optimisation software, with Exafunction raising a $25 million Series A round, as the AI & ML sector continues to expand, both in depth and breadth.