Morning VC Brief丨2024.09.19

Morning VC Brief is an expert daily curation of tech and venture news. Feel free to forward; the sign-up is here

00. TL;DR

1/ AI Interviewer Mercor raises $32M Series A at $250M

2/ Travel Reward Search Platform Point.me raises $15M Series B

3/ AI Trip Planner Mindtrip raises $12M Series A

4/ Social Events App Pie raises $11.5M Series A

5/ AI SWE Agent Infra Morph Labs raises $5.75M Seed Round

6/ Return Solution for Brands Two Boxes raises $5.3M Seed Round

7/ AI Education Tool Brisk Teaching raises $5M Seed Round

8/ Clean Hydrogen Startup Hgen raises $5M Seed Round

9/ BHP Warns AI Growth will Worsen Copper Shortfall

10/ YouTube Shorts Integrate Video Gen Model Veo

11/ Lionsgate Signs Deal With AI Startup Runway

01. Venture News

1/ AI Interviewer Mercor raises $32M Series A at $250M

Mercor uses AI to assess and match talent with companies. The company’e revenue run rate reached tens of millions with 50% monthly growth rate and being profitable. This round was led by Benchmark with participation from Peter Thiel, and more. Link

2/ Travel Reward Search Platform Point.me raises $15M Series B

Point is an award travel discovery tool and points concierge service that enables loyalty program members to find better flights for fewer points. This round was led by Nyca Partners, Citi Ventures with participation from RiverPark Ventures, Four Cities Capital, MoreThan Capital, and more. Link

3/ AI Trip Planner Mindtrip raises $12M Series A

Mindtrip is a trip planning and booking website powered by generative AI. This round was led by Forerunner Ventures, Costanoa Ventures. Link

4/ Social Events App Pie raises $11.5M Series A

Pie is a real-world socialization and friendship startup founded by Andy Dunn(co-founder of menswear brand Bonobos). This round was led by Forerunner Ventures with participation from Twitter co-founder Ev Williams, and more. Link

5/ AI SWE Agent Infra Morph Labs raises $5.75M Seed Round

Morph Labs is currently a leading provider of on-demand domain-specific evaluations and post-training data infrastructure for AI SWE agents.. This round was led by Khosla Ventures with participation from Betaworks, Irregular Expressions, and more. Link

6/ Return Solution for Brands Two Boxes raises $5.3M Seed Round

Two Boxes is building returns processing technology, revolutionizing the way returns are handled. This round was led by Peterson Ventures with participation from Assembly Ventures, Range Ventures, Matchstick Ventures, and more. Link

7/ AI Education Tool Brisk Teaching raises $5M Seed Round

Brisk Teaching is the leading AI-powered Chrome extension for educators, schools, and districts. This round was led by Owl Ventures with participation from South Park Commons, Springbank Collective, and more. Link

8/ Clean Hydrogen Startup Hgen raises $5M Seed Round

Hgen aims to disrupt the $100B hydrogen market by producing clean hydrogen from water and electricity using its proprietary alkaline electrolyzers. This round was led by Seven Seven Six with participation from Founders Fund and Fontinalis Partners. Link

02. Tech News & Updates

1/ BHP Warns AI Growth will Worsen Copper Shortfall

BHP, the world’s largest miner expects global demand for red metal will rise by more than 70% by 2050. Today, data centres are less than 1 percent of copper demand, but that is expected to be 6 to 7 percent by 2050. Copper is used not only to supply power to data centres but also in the cooling systems and to connect processors in the centre. Link

2/ YouTube Shorts Integrate Video Gen Model Veo

YouTube is integrating Google DeepMind’s AI video generation model, Veo, into YouTube Shorts, letting creators generate high-quality backgrounds as well as six-second clips. The creations on Shorts will be watermarked using DeepMind’s SynthID tech to mark them as AI-generated. Link

3/ Lionsgate Signs Deal With AI Startup Runway

Lions Gate Entertainment has agreed to give Runway, one of several fast-evolving AI startups, access to its content library in exchange for a new, custom AI model that the studio can use in the editing and production process.

The entertainment company behind “The Hunger Games” and “Twilight” plans to start using generative artificial intelligence in the creation of its new movies and TV shows, a sign of the emerging technology’s advance in Hollywood. Link