Andreessen Leading Character.AI Investment + Other Hot AI Fundraising Rounds Afoot
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Andreessen Leading Character.AI Investment + Other Hot AI Fundraising Rounds Afoot
Tale of two Silicon Valleys: AI startup rounds are hot while other deals freeze
UPDATE: I’ve since learned that Andreessen Horowitz partner Sarah Wang will take the Character.AI board seat. Originally, as part of reporting that Andreessen Horowitz had won the Character.AI round, I said that Marc Andreessen would take the board seat. I’ve since learned that was incorrect. Here’s my follow-up post.
Sources tell me that Andreessen Horowitz won the competitive effort to invest in generative artificial intelligence company Character.AI.
, who recently launched his own Substack, helped the firm win the round. Andreessen Horowitz partner Sarah Wang is expected to take the formal board seat, two sources tell me.I was the first to report that Character.AI — the neural language chatbot company founded by the creators of Google’s LaMDA — was planning to raise $250 million. I expect the deal to value Character.AI at a post-money valuation of at least $1 billion.
Meanwhile, there are a number of hot deals afoot.
I hear that NEA is expected to invest in the chatbot company Perplexity AI. The company’s CEO, Aravind Srinivas, is a former research scientist at OpenAI.
As The Information has reported Benchmark is expected to lead an investment in LangChain.
I’ve heard that Benchmark ended up investing $10 million on $50 million post-money.
LangChain founder Harrison Chase is scheduled to participate in a panel at my Cerebral Valley AI Summit on March 30 along with Benchmark’s Miles Grimshaw and Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo.
Sequoia is expected to lead an investment in Dust.
Stanislas Polu, a former research engineer at OpenAI, is one of the founders. Konstantine Buhler, who is also speaking at Cerebral Valley, is expected to lead the round.I didn’t talk to either set of conference speakers as a source for this story.
Applications for tickets are still open though spots are running out fast.
I hear that image generation company Mobius Labs is raising money from Index and Andreessen Horowitz. Mike Volpi for Index and Martin Casado for Andreessen Horowitz are spearheading the investment.
Finally, sources tell me that Index is backing an early-stage startup founded by David Schreiber, who worked at Trade Republic and Stripe.
Correction: I originally reported that Marc Andreessen would take the Character.AI board seat. Now sources tell me that a16z partner Sarah Wang will take the seat.
The Cerebral Valley AI Summit
I’m hosting an invite-only artificial intelligence summit in Hayes Valley on Thursday, March 30, with my friends at Volley.
The one-day event will feature the CEOs of Stability AI, Runway, Adept, and Quora, along with the president of Jasper.
John Curtius, who left Tiger Global to found his new fund Cedar, will be speaking publicly for the first time since his departure.
Deep Nishar, the former senior SoftBank Vision Fund investor-turned lead growth investor for General Catalyst, will sit down with me.
Investors from Benchmark, Bloomberg Beta, Coatue, Founders Fund, Greylock, Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed, and Sequoia are scheduled to participate.
We’ll have two panels of early-stage YC company founders speaking about their new companies.
You can see the speaker list on our website.
We’re now accepting applications to this 200-person event. You can apply here.
Spots are extremely limited but we will do our best to give preference to paid Newcomer subscribers. Tickets cost $599 and we’re offering early-stage founders who are accepted significant discounts on a case-by-case basis.
Update: I originally linked to the wrong Dust company website. It appears that there might be two Dusts. I’ve updated with the right one and added the name the founder of the company that Sequoia backed.