Hello friend,
Menlo Ventures released last week its 2024 State of AI Report. According to this must-read report, Generative AI has become a mission-critical business tool, with enterprise spending surging to $13.8 billion this year—more than 6x the investment in 2023.
Key insights from 600 enterprise IT leaders:
- Adoption is accelerating: 72% anticipate broader use of generative AI, with 60% of investments moving from innovation budgets to core business spending.
- Top use cases driving ROI: Code copilots (51%), support chatbots (31%), enterprise search (28%), data transformation (27%), and meeting summarisation (24%) are leading the way, boosting productivity and efficiency.
- Build vs. Buy: Enterprises are increasingly confident in building their AI tools, with a near 50/50 split between in-house solutions and vendor-sourced platforms.
- The rise of vertical AI: Industries like healthcare, legal, financial services, and media are adopting specialised AI tools tailored to domain-specific workflows.
Infrastructure trends reveal that multi-model strategies are dominating as OpenAI cedes ground to Anthropic, while retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is becoming the default architecture, powering advanced AI applications with vector databases and ETL pipelines.
The generative AI era is just beginning, and enterprises are prioritising long-term value over quick wins. I'm curious to know what your take is on enterprise AI.
P.S.: if you're a CTO or tech leader, you can join the free Unicorn CTO Slack community. We're a small group of international CTOs and tech leaders, and we often meet for virtual (or not) coffees.
Now, let's dive into last week's developer-first transactions.
💰 Market Summary - Week of November 18th, 2024
- 12 companies raised $5.19 billion across 6 product categories in 5 countries.
- Europe-based companies attracted 0.4% of the total funding vs 99.6% for US-based companies.
- AI is the category that attracted the highest funding.
- 2 companies provide or contribute to an open-source product.
- 0 companies were acquired this week.
🧩 Funding by Product Category
🌎 Funding by Region
🏢 Funding By Company
Anthropic, based in San Francisco 🇺🇸, raised another $4B from Amazon. Anthropic is developing reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems, and is known for Claude, an AI assistant designed for scalability across various tasks. (more)
LogicMonitor, headquartered in Santa Barbara 🇺🇸, secured $800M in Series D+ funding from PSG and Golub Capital. LogicMonitor offers SaaS-based automated monitoring for IT infrastructure, using AI to proactively prevent issues and improve IT operations. (more)
Kong, from San Francisco 🇺🇸, garnered $175M at a $2B valuation, led by Tiger Global and co-led by Balderton. Kong is a leader in API management, helping companies become API-first through its cloud native API platform. (more)
Spectro Cloud, based in San Jose 🇺🇸, raised $75M in Series C funding led by Growth Equity at Goldman Sachs Alternatives. Spectro Cloud offers a comprehensive platform to manage diverse Kubernetes environments, enhancing control, visibility, and efficiency for IT teams. (more)
Lightning AI, located in New York 🇺🇸, secured $50M in Series C funding from Cisco Investments, J.P. Morgan, K5 Global, and NVIDIA. Lightning AI provides an advanced cloud-based development environment, simplifying coding on CPUs and GPUs for developers. (more)
Roboflow, from Des Moines 🇺🇸, raised $40M in Series B funding led by GV (Google Ventures). Roboflow simplifies building with computer vision, providing tools for image data management, model training, and deployment. (more)
Wordware, based in San Francisco 🇺🇸, secured $30M in Seed funding led by Spark Capital. Wordware is innovating in AI-driven development with a web-hosted IDE that integrates prompting as a programming language. (more)
Apideck, located in Antwerp 🇧🇪, raised $7.5M in Series A funding led by Airbridge Equity Partners. Apideck is a leading Unified API platform that emphasises scalability and security without storing sensitive customer data. (more)
Pruna AI, based in Munich 🇩🇪, garnered $6.5M in Seed funding led by EQT Ventures. Pruna AI offers solutions to enhance AI model efficiency, making them cheaper, faster, smaller, and greener. (more)
Marimo, from San Francisco 🇺🇸, raised $5M in Seed funding led by AIX Ventures. Marimo is developing Python tools for ML and data science, starting with the Marimo notebook—a free and open-source environment. (more)
Eden AI, located in Lyon 🇫🇷, secured $3.1M in Seed funding led by Galion.exe. Eden AI simplifies AI technology deployment with a unique API that connects to the best AI engines. (more)
Delta Cygni Labs, based in Tampere 🇫🇮, raised $3.1M in Seed funding led by First Gate Invest. They specialise in ultra-low-latency data streaming for applications in video, AI, drones, and IoT. (more)
🤝 Mergers & Acquisitions
No transactions last week
⭐️ Trending GitHub Repositories
DataExpert-io / data-engineer-handbook (✩ 7,060 stars this week) - This is a repo with links to everything you'd ever want to learn about data engineering.
twentyhq / twenty (✩ 2,978 stars this week) - Building a modern alternative to Salesforce, powered by the community (Twenty announced a $5m Seed round this week).
payloadcms / payload (✩ 2,340 stars this week) - Payload is the open-source, fullstack Next.js framework, giving you instant backend superpowers. Get a full TypeScript backend and admin panel instantly. Use Payload as a headless CMS or for building powerful applications.
☕️ Developer-First Breakfast in Paris
Last week, I had the privilege of hosting an intimate breakfast with Sébastien Dominé, VP Developer Tools at NVIDIA, at the Avolta offices in Paris.
Sébastien shared invaluable insights from his 24+ years at NVIDIA, leading global teams to build world-class developer tools, and discussed the exciting intersection of AI, GPUs, and developer-first innovation.
The room was filled with an amazing group of founders sparking conversations about the future of software engineering, building tools for global developers, and scaling in the AI era. Sébastien also shared some anecdotes about how it is to work at NVIDIA, especially with a founder like Jensen Huang.
If you missed this one, stay tuned—I'm planning more events to bring top-tier insights to the developer-first ecosystem.
Thanks for reading this far! I'm excited to make this newsletter as helpful as possible and I would appreciate if you could share feedback or anything you want to find here.
Farewell,
Daniel