USC alumni Gabriel Pereyra and Winston Weinberg co-founded Harvey.ai, a leader in AI automation for the legal profession. Image courtesy of Harvey.ai
Any venture capitalist worth their salt will tell you this. Keep a clear mind, beware of hype, focus on risk and return.
Since 2021, this mentality has led to a significant decline in investment in AI startups, contrary to what one might expect given the media frenzy around the potential impact of AI. After receiving initial funding, many companies struggled to gain a foothold in the market and venture capitalists simply weren’t seeing the return they needed.
“Even though there is enormous interest in generative AI startups, the reality is that very few companies have found product-market fit beyond pilot-scale demonstrations,” explained Ralph Lin, founder of the startup and AI CEO. USC Viterbi Office of Technological Innovation and Entrepreneurship (TIE). “Engineer-entrepreneurs are naturally suited to tackling these challenges located directly at the intersection of technology and business. »
We are now witnessing a slight increase – from April to June, investors poured $27.1 billion into U.S. AI startups, accounting for nearly half of all startup funding during that period. Several companies founded by USC Viterbi faculty and alumni are riding the wave, successfully navigating the ups and downs of the AI investment landscape over the past year.
Harvey, co-founded by USC Gould School of Law graduate Winston Weinberg (JD ’16) and USC Viterbi computer science graduate Gabriel Pereyra (BS ’16), recently got a $100 million raise of dollars. The company specializes in AI automation for the legal profession, creating personalized LLMs trained in complex research and writing tasks.
Physical Intelligence, led by CEO Karol Hausman (PhD ’18), raised $70 million in seed funding; the company develops core models and learning algorithms that can power a wide range of robots and physically actuated devices.
GrayMatter Robotics, which produces AI-enhanced industrial robots designed to assist humans with tedious and ergonomic tasks, has secured $45 million in Series B funding. The USC Viterbi-dominated team includes co-founders Ariyan Kabir (PhD ’19), AME research associate Brual Shah, and SK Gupta, Smith International Professor of Mechanical Engineering and director of the USC Center for Advanced Manufacturing.
Dani Yogatama, an associate professor in USC’s Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science, saw an influx of $60 million in Series A funding for his multimodal generative AI company, Reka, of which he is CEO.
Founded by computer scientist Varun Badhwar (BS’ 2006), supply chain security software platform Endor Labs has raised $70 million in Series A funding.
Machine learning operations platform FedML has raised $17.5 million in seed funding. The CEO and co-founder of FedML is Salman Avêteshr, dean professor of electrical and computer engineering at USC. Avesteemhr is also the mind behind the USC-Amazon Center on Secure and Trusted Machine Learningand Director of the Information Theory and Machine Learning (vITAL) Research Laboratory.
Tech startups aren’t the only ones maximizing AI’s investment potential. USC has a long history of training engineers to become leaders in the space industry, and the new space economy is ripe for startups.
Founded by former SpaceX engineers and USC graduates Shilpa Gollapudi (MSc ’15) and Austin Spiegel (BS ’15), Sift has raised $17.5 million in Series A funding. The company aims to simplify telemetry processes to optimize the recording, visualization and interpretation of machine data.
Meanwhile, Ursa Major raised $138 million in Series D funding to develop its 3D printed rocket engines. Founded by Joe Laurienti (BS ’11) and employing several USC alumni, the company is in the race alongside Relativity Space, which launched the first 3D printed rocket. It should be noted that Relativity Space founders Tim Ellis (BS ’12, MS ’13) and Jordan Noone (BS ’14) received their training at USC Rocket Propulsion Laboratory (RPL).
This is just a sample of a series of successful fundraising projects over the past year. What the majority of these companies share is a focus on foundational AI models: instead of simply building on existing models, they innovate from the ground up.
As a result, founders of USC AI startups meet investors on the same level. As the saying goes, “eat roots, not shoots.” In other words, focus on technology that has the potential to change the direction in which AI models develop, and your investment will likely support a synergistic network of innovation instead of running out of steam like a shoot short-term.
USC sets a strong precedent when it comes to looking beyond superficial innovation: the university has a history of incubating “behind-the-scenes” fundamental research that has revolutionized the development of health technology. ‘AI. Notably, the publication of the seminal paper “Attention is All You Need,” credited with introducing the transformer architecture that sparked unprecedented advances in natural language processing – paving the way for Chat GPT alongside other innovations in deep learning and open source distributed training. .
It turns out that the USC duo who produced the paper, Ashish Vaswani (PhD ’14) and Niki Parmar (MS ’15), have now secured $56 million in Series A funding for their research company. Enterprise AI, Essential.
Too often, the mindsets of academic research and entrepreneurship are seen as different worlds. One was to focus on the details of fundamental questions – the other was to extrapolate these results for globally relevant application. In the context of engineering, however, the two come together.
“We are proud to continue the tradition of innovation at USC,” commented Lin. “Our deep focus on engineering fundamentals education at Viterbi, combined with a vision of society-level impact, sets our programs and graduates apart. »
Published on August 20, 2024
Last updated August 20, 2024