Funding activity in the Bay Area may be slow, but generative artificial intelligence technology and startups remain red hot.
The latest case in point: Adept AI Labs LLC announced Tuesday that it's raised $350 million in a Series B deal that reportedly boosted it into unicorn status.
Like OpenAI LLC and numerous other local companies, the San Francisco startup is developing generative AI technology, which is a version of artificial intelligence that can create text, images or other things that simulate those that humans produce. In its case, Adept has focused its ACT-1 software on doing a wide range of business tasks in response to commands.
"We're building a future in which you can tell your computer to do something in your own words, and then just watch it happen on your screen," the company said in a blog post about its new funding round.
Adept is headed by CEO David Luan, who previously led a program at Google LLC that developed large machine learning models. Ashish Vaswani, the startup's chief scientist, and Niki Parmar, its chief technology officer, previously worked as researchers at Google's Brain group, which focuses on AI research.
General Catalyst led and Spark Capital co-led Adept's new round, which came at a valuation of about $1 billion, according to PitchBook Data. Addition, Greylock Partners, Atlassian Ventures, Microsoft Corp., Nvidia Corp., Workday Ventures, Caterina Fake, Frontiers Capital, PSP Growth, SV Angel and A.Capital also invested.
Here's more Bay Area venture and startup news from midweek:
Fundings
- Skale Education Inc. (dba Upduo), San Francisco, $4 million, seed: Impact Venture Capital led the round for this developer of software that connects work colleagues for peer-to-peer training sessions. Sky9 Capital also invested.
Funders in the news
- Y Combinator announced it will not raise another fund that focuses on investing in late-stage startups. The Mountain View-based accelerator operator and venture investor said it plans to refocus on early-stage companies. It is letting go 17 people as a result of the move. The leaders of the YC Continuity fund, Anu Hariharan and Ali Rowghani, are leaving to launch their own growth-stage fund.
- General Catalyst plans to raise at least $5 billion for its 12th flagship fund, according to Bloomberg. The Palo Alto-based venture firm raised $4.6 billion in its last round of fundraising, which it completed in February last year.
