Regular updates on the latest VC-backed AI startups. Follow along to stay informed!
Dumme, an AI video editor, raised $3.4M in Seed Round financing. The round was led by Y Combinator, with Caffeinated Capital, SciFi VC, Suhail Doshi, Nico Chinot, Protocol Labs, Chris Puscasiu, and other angels participating.
Problem to be Solved
Content creators outsource menial video editing jobs like cutting down long-form content for publication on short-form platforms like YouTube Shorts, TikTok, or Instagram Reels to expensive human contractors. Dumme believes AI can do it cheaper and better.
How They Use AI
Dumme is stringing together quite a few models to bring this product to life. Step one is to transcribe the video using OpenAI’s Whisper model (the same model that powers the speech-to-text in the ChatGPT app—if you haven’t tried it yet, you need to, it’s pretty great). Once the video is transcribed, they feed it into a language model (e.g., GPT-4) with the assignment of picking out the relevant parts. Finally, they hand off the clippings to a different model that cuts the relevant parts of the video and stitches them together into a short. This example showcases advanced AI capabilities that have been integrated through the use of third-party APIs. It serves as a prime example of an AI startup that has gone beyond just being a mere wrapper.
Business Model
The company is initially targeting YouTube creators, podcasters, and agencies and believes the latter would be the best bet for monetizing the product via subscription fees. Dumme has hundreds of creators testing the product and more than 20,000 on the waitlist, which it is onboarding in waves after initial demand crashed the servers.
MindsDB, a provider of a platform enabling developers to ship AI-powered projects, raised $25m in Seed Round expansion funding (in addition to its earlier $25M Seed Round). The deal was led by Mayfield, with participation from TQ Ventures and existing investor Benchmark Capital.
Problem to be Solved
Integrating machine learning and AI models into a product or workflow can be time-consuming, difficult, and expensive due to technical expertise, platform expansion, and hosting costs. MindsDB enables companies to train and run ML models directly in their database, saving effort, reducing the number of platforms to subscribe to, and decreasing costs.
How They Use AI
MindsDB offers out-of-the-box solutions for many of the common machine-learning models for regression and classification. They allow users to create “virtual tables” that enable predictions based on current data without ever having to leave their database.
Business Model
MindsDB has a usage-based pricing model that starts at $0.70 /hr. The company claims It takes ~10 hours a month to manage and update an open-source instance of MindsDB and that the average developer costs $54 /hr.
Elise, a conversational AI platform for property managers, raised $35M in Series C funding.
Problem to be Solved
Multifamily property managers spend too much time and money engaging with potential and current renters. Elise aims to automate these conversations (yep, the old customer service chatbot you probably don’t love—now with LLMs).
How They Use AI
Elise seems like a cut-and-dry LangChain solution that will save property managers a ton of time. Elise is built on large language models (probably GPT-4) and uses property documentation to answer questions and complaints from current and prospective tenants.
Business Model
SaaS. The company currently serves 1.5 million units across 200 customers, including leading owners and operators such as Asset Living, Bozzuto, and Venterra.