Morning VC Brief丨2024.08.13

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/ Sakana AI introduced 'The AI Scientist'

2/ Meta, Universal Music Group address AI music in new licensing agreement

3/ a16z-backed fintech Tally burned out $172M

4/ AI software Agent startup Cosine introduced state-of-the-art agent Genie

5/ AI Agent developing toolkit MemGPT raises 10M Seed Round at $70M

6/ Lip-sync model startup Sync. raises 5.5M Seed Round

7/ 10-minute rapid battery charging startup Gaussion raises 12M Series A

8/ Portable food sensor startup Amulet raises 5.8M Series A

01. Tech News

1/ Sakana AI introduced 'The AI Scientist'

The AI Scientist is the world’s first AI system for automating scientific research and open-ended discovery. From ideation, writing code, running experiments and summarizing results, to writing entire papers and conducting peer-review, The AI Scientist opens a new era of AI-driven scientific research and accelerated discovery.

Sakana AI was founded last year by Ha and Jones, who co-authored the Google research paper that outlined the transformer model architecture. Link

2/ Meta, Universal Music Group address AI music in new licensing agreement

Meta and Universal Music Group (UMG) announced the expansion of their multi-year music licensing agreement, which enables users to share songs from UMG’s music library across Meta’s platforms without violating copyright.

The new agreement states that the two companies are addressing “unauthorized AI-generated content.” Earlier this month, Sudo publicly admitted to using copyrighted songs but claimed it was legal under fair use. Link

3/ a16z-backed fintech Tally burned out $172M

Tally was initially designed to help people manage their credit cards and pay off high-interest debt through a lower interest loan. Founded in 2015, Tally had raised $172 million in funding over the years. The latest round valued the company at $885 million. Earlier Monday, founder Jason Brown said “after exploring all options,” it was “unable to secure the necessary funding to continue our operations.” Link

4/ AI software Agent startup Cosine introduced state-of-the-art agent Genie

Genie achieves state-of-the-art on SWE-Bench with 30.08%, which is a 57% improvement. SWE Bench is a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate the coding abilities of large language models across various software engineering tasks. Link

02. Venture News

1/ AI Agent developing toolkit MemGPT raises 10M Seed Round at $70M

MemGPT helps users build LLM agents with long term memory and custom tools. The MemGPT project has over 11,000 stars on GitHub, indicating the project's popularity among developers. This round was led by Felicis Ventures. Link

2/ Lip-sync model startup Sync. raises 5.5M Seed Round

Sync. is an ai lipsync tool for video content creators. Recently launched lipsync-1.7.0-beta is an experimental state-of-the-art video-to-video lipsync model that generates more natural teeth and accurate skin tones. This round was led by GV with participation from Rebel Fund, Creator Ventures and Lobster Capital. Link

3/ 10-minute rapid battery charging startup Gaussion raises 12M Series A

Gaussion, a University College London (UCL) spinoff, offers a viable and scalable solution to meet the growing demand for more efficient and powerful energy storage systems. The team has taken commercial cells designed to charge in 1-5 hours and demonstrated 1,000+ cycles of consecutive 10-minute charging while still meeting all warranty specifications. This round was led by Autotech Ventures with participation from BGF Ventures and UCL Technology Fund. Link

4/ Portable food sensor startup Amulet raises 5.8M Series A

Amulet gives consumers the ability to detect food allergens at the table. Amulet also equips manufacturers, CPGs, and researchers with portable and rapid electrochemical detection capabilities for food toxins and contaminants. This round was led by HealthX Ventures with participation from Great Oaks Venture Capital, AllerFund and Mendota Venture Capital.