Techcrunch blog!: Here, read this AI-improved novel

Tuesday, February 27, 2024

Good morning and welcome to TechCrunch AM. If you are building a startup that uses AI, there's a lot for you in today's issue. We also bring: New venture funds that founders can target in their next fundraising cycle, notes for folks who run platforms on major, potential legal changes in a key market for Internet media, and several mega-rounds that should make everyone in Startup Land breathe a sigh of relief: Big checks are back, baby!

– Alex

TechCrunch Top 3

Inkitt raises $37M for AI-tweaked fiction: Inkitt's fresh Series C (led by Vinod Khosla) is proof that reading is not yet dead. The service offers a place for authors to share their works with potential readers, and their works are included in its reading app Galatea if they do well. There's an AI angle, with Inkitt picking the "most compelling [stories uploaded to its service] to tweak and subsequently distribute and sell on Galatea." I am 85,000 words into writing a novel, so I'm viscerally aware of how large a project writing a book is. More folks writing, more tools to help, and potentially more readers? I dig it.
The future of the Internet up for debate: Can companies control what is uploaded to, and shared on, their own platforms? That's the question before the United States Supreme Court, which is hearing a case concerning two state laws that "limit how social media companies can moderate the content on their platforms," Taylor Hatmaker reports. It's a massive case and it could reshape how online platforms function in the United States, a critical market for digital services.
Microsoft tosses Mistral AI $16M: Compared to the funds that Microsoft has pumped into OpenAI, the recent investment by the U.S.-based tech giant into French AI startup Mistral is modest. But it's important for two reasons: One, Microsoft wants to ensure that no matter which company makes the best AI models, it has access to those LLMs and can ensure that they play nice with its Azure cloud platform. Second, with regulators poking at Microsoft's relationship with OpenAI, having more than one AI buddy is good corporate politics.

Image Credits: Richard Sharrocks / Getty Images

Don't miss these

Will Reddit become a meme stock? Reddit, the social forum service many individual investors call home, is going public. Many Reddit users love to trade, and have turned some companies' equity into "meme stocks" (investments that are driven more by community sentiment than, say, traditional investing philosophies). We all recall the Gamestop matter, right? The question before Reddit is what it will be like to live as a public company that is also a conversational host to a bunch of folks with itchy trading fingers. At a minimum, the company's IPO will give us a fascinating look at how much power individual investors have over market movements.

Did you know that AI engineers work a lot? That was my takeaway from reading cross-cultural work notes by AI researchers. After an OpenAI denizen shared his daily work and life schedule, a member of Alibaba's own LLM crew did the same, which ended up as direct evidence that AI research is more or less the same everywhere. It's a lot of work, a lot of thinking, and not a lot of time doing much else.

Capital incoming: Based in Dubai, COTU Ventures has put together a $54 million first fund. The capital will go to "startups in the Middle East from pre-seed to seed stages." We love a pre-seed fund, and it's good to see a new one pop up in a region that could use the investing capital.

Speaking of the Middle East, and capital inflows, the Qatar Investment Authority intends to inject $1 billion into the venture world through a fund-of-funds. Qatar wants startups and VCs to consider it as a destination (money from wealthy nations in the region is not anything new in venture capital, of course).

Elsewhere in the world of technology, Asymmetric Financial has put together a bitcoin-focused decentralized finance fund worth $21 million. This round adds to the evidence that there's good reason to expect 2024 to be far better for web3 than 2023 was.

And to close out the fund-focused portion of this newsletter: Zacua Ventures has compiled a $56 million fund focused on early-stage construction tech startups. Construction tech – and close cousin proptech – is not simple, but it is a massive market.

Shadowfax raises $100M for Indian last-mile logistics: In India, Shadowfax wants to unify "disparate elements in India's last-mile ecosystem," and has raised a Series E to keep working on the challenge. The round stands out thanks to its size – India has seen venture capital inflow slow down in recent quarters, which makes this nine figure round a positive signal.

Glean raises $200M for enterprise AI: When Glean was born, the startup's founders wanted to help workers at companies find the information that they needed faster. Now with generative AI at the forefront of its tech, Glean can do a lot more, like ingesting operational data from companies – chats, support tickets, etc. – to better answer employees' queries.

Danish startup wants to limit subscription churn: Danish startup Subsets is building retention-focused software for subscription media. I know from personal experience how brutal churn can be for media products that depend on recurring revenue, so I can see why the startup exists. It just raised $1.65 million, and is working with The Athletic as well as a Danish newspaper.

SpaceX's Starship fixes approved by FAA: Building big rockets from scratch is not an easy task because early versions tend to go boom. SpaceX had to endure a review by the Federal Aviation Administration after its second Starship orbital test ended in a fiery mess, despite some notable achievements. The FAA has approved the fixes SpaceX wants to make, and once they are done, the company will be able to give its massive rocket another go.

Image Credits: TechCrunch

Before you go

Can your phone do this? Many phones can fold these days — it's a neat way to create larger phones that can still have a compact form factor some of the time. However, Motorola has something even better up its sleeve: a rollable phone. I struggle to come up with a use case, but I want one all the same.