Hard to raise money nowadays? Not for AI start-ups.

3 innovation and digital news in 1 minute. Every Monday. Episode 376

$23 million. Devin, a software engineer name

Cognition Labs is a small team based in the US that just launched Devin, an “AI software engineer”. Devin just acts step by step like a software engineer: own command line, code editor, browser. It can build and deploy a website. Gathered $23 million for that project. Opinion: This is the start and the demonstration where generative AI will transform the most. Software engineering. Code is language, reasoning is key for software engineering and LLMs are getting good at this. Cognition Labs published a competition chart (see below) on how good AI can be in software.

Everyone a software engineer? Soon.

€13 million. Oxolo videos

Oxolo is very simple. Enter a product URL (Amazon product link) and Oxolo engine produces a product video automatically. Then the user can edit it. A free version for 15 videos and then monthly subscription depending on the number of videos produced. The AI at the back builds the avatar (real person), audio and mix. Opinion: We’ve attended a talk by Oxolo’s founder, a good impression. The business lies in B2B, it is indeed tedious to build such a business with B2C, only for Amazon merchants. An EU company, Hamburg-based, unlike HeyGen (Chinese invest and dev) and Synthesia (UK).

Good luck, dear neighbour!

$20 million. Adaptive ML for singular Gen AI

Adaptive ML is a development environment for developing closed generative AI applications. For example a sales reporting with AI feature solely and not bound to larger suite like SAP or Microsoft. Opinion: Just difficult to really grasp what Adaptive ML does. Still, two large venture capital firms bought into it. Index Ventures (Menlo Park) with 1,125 investments like Personio or Rohlik. And Iconiq with few investments (73) like Canva or Robinhood.

Let’s follow up on Adaptive, based in Paris.