Markku Räsänen’s Post

🔐🤖 I am excited to share that ConfidentialMind has secured a €1.5M pre-seed round led by Failup Ventures with support from Innovestor, Founders' Edge, and top data industry angel investors. The round consists of a €1M equity investment and a €0.5M loan from the Finnish government. We believe that the real value of AI will be in edge and private data centers. This is where the most valuable corporate and sovereign data resides. The systems that enable AI in data centers are traditionally difficult to build and maintain. We make development and deployment of generative AI models and applications in enterprise and government data centers as easy – or in some cases even easier – than in the cloud. We are at the forefront of innovation, seamlessly blending cutting-edge open-source advancements in the LLM space, with our unparalleled software infrastructure and components. This powerful combination empowers enterprises and governments to integrate generative AI on their own terms, providing the flexibility to build once and deploy anywhere. This is just the beginning! Jesse Heikkilä, Oscar Andersin, Topias Soininen, Hannu Jungman, Henry Nilert, Pekka Ylitalo, Ali Omar, ilkka Hiidenheimo, Daniel Fried, Jonathan Scudder, Markus Oksanen, Jan Goetz, Juha Vartiainen, Sofokus Ventures, Eljas Linna, Stefano Chiavegati, Elena G., Mark Faris, Michel Faris, Sylwia Barthel de Weydenthal (she/her), Henrikki Makynen, Joel-Oskar Raisanen Markku Räsänen, Severi Tikkala, Henri Dahl, Raido Linde, Dan Zi, Lucas Björklund

To build a future where AI is human-centric and is deployed responsibly requires a full systems approach. To see initiatives where there are commitments made at the source of the AI life-cycle—essentially to make positive choices about whose tech and products get funded—makes me optimistic. I’d welcome seeing more VC and funder signatories to this piece of work. #ai #aipolicy #aigovernance

Max Welling and Alyn Chad Edwards started work on CuspAI two months ago, and have just secured $30m from a roll call of well-known VCs from Europe and the US. Hoxton led the seed round, with Lightspeed, Basis Set, Northzone, Giant Ventures, FJ labs, Zero Prime Ventures and Tiferes Ventures also participating — plus Google Deepmind operators Mehdi Ghissassi and Dorothy Chou. CuspAI is a search engine for materials. Users can input the properties they want materials to have, and Cusp will generate the chemical composition needed to achieve it. Cusp’s team says its tech can help produce new materials needed for climate technologies, particularly in carbon capture. More: https://lnkd.in/eraB7234

🚀 It's time for this week's #AISocialImpactSpotlight! Munich-based startup trail recently secured €1.45 million in a pre-seed round, led by CapitalT with participation from NP-Hard Ventures, Mozilla Ventures, Common Magic, and several business angels. This funding will boost trail’s product development, team expansion, and market leadership in #AIgovernance across Europe. 🌍 In an era of rapid AI advancements and impending regulations, trust is paramount. trail’s AI governance copilot is designed to meet this need, providing a developer-friendly solution for scalable #trustworthyAI development. Their platform integrates and structures AI project data, facilitating compliance and collaboration across disciplines. 🔍 Trail automates governance workflows, technical documentation, and transparency, preparing companies for the EU AI Act and ISO 42001 certification. 📊 They even offer a free self-assessment tool to help businesses determine their AI use case obligations. The founding team, Anna Spitznagel, Nikolaus Pinger, and Sven Hölzel, formed trail based on their experiences at TU Munich and CDTM, aiming to merge trust and efficiency in AI governance. 🎓🤝 Read more about trail's latest success here: https://lnkd.in/gq89ubTn! #AIGovernance #TrustworthyAI #StartupNews #AISocialImpactSpotlight

European early stages valuation need to be lower faster. It does not seem VCs and startups understood what has been happening (bad habits and lazyness to adapt)- It’s like nothing happened regarding valuation! Are we living in a Schema Ponzi in the European Venture market ? In US : Of all the venture-backed startups out there, only ~11% go public or get acquired. So for early-stage investors, the math becomes a lot more difficult to make work if only 1 in 10 of your bets will make it, and of those bets that do make it the size of the outcome is, on average, probably $500 million to $1 billion outcomes. Those smaller outcomes mean investors need lower entry valuations, and higher ownership to justify the returns they’ve promised to LPs.

The rise of AI-powered platforms is transforming industries, economies, and societal structures. The future is clear: integrating artificial intelligence into everyday operations will become essential for survival in the digital age. A significant shift is happening where traditional boundaries between tech companies and other industries are blurring. Every business will need to adopt a tech-centric strategy to thrive. However, not every business owner has the expertise to leverage technology. This is where accelerators like MVP Ventures come into play. MVP Ventures supports those who lack the technical skills to build thriving businesses globally. They provide expertise in software development, marketing, product management, and venture capitalism, focusing on nurturing startups to survive in the digital space. Read more here: https://bit.ly/3R88SVb

📕📗Back to school! 📘📔 To kick off the academic year, we'd like to share the proposal of Jerome Pesenti who has just launched the Sizzle AI app. Our investment fund, FrenchFounders, recently invested in it alongside Owl Ventures Sizzle AI perfectly exemplifies the potential of AI. As the former VP of AI at Meta, Jérôme deeply understands AI’s capabilities for not only transforming businesses but also our way of learning. With Sizzle, AI isn’t just a simple automated response tool. It becomes a genuine mentor, guiding learners at every step of their thinking and understanding process. It demystifies the learning process, encouraging students to think critically rather than seeking out ready-made solutions. This marks the birth of a vision - one where education is augmented by technology, and not replaced by it. We are not only proud to invest in this vision but are also eager to see how it will shape the future of education. Do you feel the same? 🚀 Join us for a conversation with Jérôme Pesenti at the Transatlantic Leaders Forum https://lnkd.in/dPhRzXVE on November 3, 2023, in New York; in partnership with Goldman Sachs & Tikehau Capital #startup #AI #aieducation cc Eva Nilsson, Ryad Hacene, Benoit Buridant, Vincent Deruelle, LeFonds by FrenchFounders

We've wrapped up the final panel of the day with panellists from Pathway, Builder.ai, People.ai and Sequoia Capital — moderated by John Thornhill, founder and editorial director at Sifted. This panel focussed on all things AI and how it’s setting the EU Scene, check out some of these key takeaways: "The realisation in every board room is AI is a winner takes all situation. It’s sped up by infrastructure players and hype." - Oleg Rogynskyy, CEO and founder at People.ai "Data is extremely important - but have to consider semantics, context and consistency." - Sachin Dev Duggal, cofounder and chief wizard at Builder.ai "The only constant in life is change - technology should be responsive and reactive. AI is a bit stuck in time, this is an issue that costs money." - Zuzanna Stamirowska, CEO and cofounder at Pathway "Computers are the bicycle of the mind and AI is the automobile of the mind" Konstantine Buhler, partner at Sequoia Capital What are your thoughts on this session? #startupevent #techevent #siftedsummit #scaleup #startupcommunity #startuplife #innovation #entrepreneurmindset #startupconference #smallbusiness #networking #startupeurope #founders

Top 5 funding rounds of the week: 📌 1. Sentient - developing an open-source AI platform aimed at building community-driven artificial general intelligence Founded by: Sandeep Nailwal Raised: $85 million in seed funding. Investors included Founders Fund, Pantera Capital, Framework Ventures, Robot Ventures, Delphi, Republic, and Arrington Capital. 📌 2. Prodia - API and large-scale GPU infrastructure for AI-powered image generation integration Founded by: Shawn Wilkinson Raised: $15 million in seed funding. Investors included Dragonfly Capital, HashKey Capital, Web3.com, Index Ventures, Symbolic Capital, OKX Ventures, EV3, Artichoke, TRGC, Folius, Tangent Capital, Southern Equity, Balaji Srinivasan, and Polygon founder Sandeep Nailwal. 📌 3. Phaidra - develops control systems to optimize the performance of industrial facilities, including data centers Founded by: Jim Gao Raised: $12 million in funding. Investors included Index Ventures. 📌 4. Redactive - tools for data synchronization to help enterprises deploy generative AI applications Founded by: Alexander Valente Raised: $7.5 million in seed funding. Investors included Felicis Ventures, Blackbird Ventures, Atlassian Ventures, and Zapier. 📌 5. Steep - enabling users to query data in natural language and generate visualizations for accessible data exploration and analysis Founded by: Johan Baltzar and Nino Höglund Raised: $4.3 million in seed funding. Investors included Connect Ventures, Inventure, Alliance VC, Antler, and Greens. Congrats to everyone!