Morning VC Brief丨2024.08.21

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/ Next-Gen A/B Test platform Eppo raises $28M Series B

2/ Grocery Delivery Startup The Rounds raises $24M Series B

3/ Asteroid Mining Startup AstroForge raises $40M Series A

4/ AI Construction Startup Trunk Tolls raises $20M Series A

5/ Military Logistics Startup Defcon AI raises $44M Seed Round

6/ AI RPA Startup Cassidy raises $3.7M Seed Round

7/ Microsoft releases new Phi-3.5 models

8/ OpenAI Launch Fine-tuning for GPT-4o

01. Venture News

1/ Next-Gen A/B Test platform Eppo raises $28M Series B

Eppo is an experimentation platform that lets users evaluate and customize AI models for specific use cases. Eppo also provides a general A/B testing platform and service for apps and websites. This round was led by Innovation Endeavors with participation from Menlo Ventures, Amplify Partners and Icon Ventures. Link

2/ Grocery Delivery Startup The Rounds raises $24M Series B

The Rounds delivers recurring grocery and household essentials in reusable packaging. The Rounds enhanced its AI-powered algorithm to provide smarter predictions on when customer’s products need to be restocked. This round was led by Moderne Ventures with participation from Construct Capital, First Round Capital, FJ Labs and Redpoint Ventures. Link

3/ Asteroid Mining Startup AstroForge raises $40M Series A

AstroForge aims to mine asteroids in space for valuable minerals. Their 3rd mission, Vestri, will return to a target Near Earth Asteroid and dock with the body in space. Link

4/ AI Construction Startup Trunk Tolls raises $20M Series A

Trunk Tolls provides automation tools to organize unstructured construction documentation. Trunk Tools’ platform can take in files like PDFs, spreadsheets, drawings, blueprints and tables and answer questions about them in a chatbot-like interface. This round was led by Redpoint with participation from Innovation Endeavors. Link

5/ Military Logistics Startup Defcon AI raises $44M Seed Round

Defcon AI is building a next-generation modeling, simulation, and analysis (MS&A) toolset for the modern military logistics and transportation environment. This round was led by Bessemer Venture Partners with participation from Fifth Growth Fund, Red Cell Partners, and more. Link

6/ AI RPA Startup Cassidy raises $3.7M Seed Round

Cassidy is a more intelligent automation platform that makes every decision with full context on business data, allowing teams to quickly build custom AI automations and agents. This round was led by The General Partnership with participation from Neo, Comma Capital, Ride Ventures, and more. Link

02. Tech News & Updates

1/ Microsoft releases new Phi-3.5 models

Microsoft releases powerful new Phi-3.5 models, beating Google, OpenAI and more. The three models include the 3.82B parameter Phi-3.5-mini-instruct, the 41.9B parameter Phi-3.5-MoE-instruct, and the 4.15B parameter Phi-3.5-vision-instruct, each designed for basic/fast reasoning, more powerful reasoning, and vision (image and video analysis) tasks.

All three models also boast near state-of-the-art performance across a number of third-party benchmark tests, even beating other AI providers including Google’s Gemini 1.5 Flash, Meta’s Llama 3.1, and even OpenAI’s GPT-4o in some cases. Link

2/ OpenAI Launch Fine-tuning for GPT-4o

Developers can now fine-tune GPT-4o with custom datasets to get higher performance at a lower cost for their specific use cases.

Cosine’s Genie is powered by a fine-tuned GPT-4o model trained on examples of real software engineers at work, enabling the model to learn to respond in a specific way. With a fine-tuned GPT-4o model, Genie achieves a SOTA score of 43.8% on the new SWE-bench(opens in a new window) Verified benchmark. Link