Benchmark invests in and works alongside entrepreneurs building startups into transformational companies. They focus on early-stage venture investing in mobile, marketplaces, social, and infrastructure and enterprise software. Founded in 1995, the firm has offices in Woodside and San Francisco, California. The firm has been recognized for its commitment to open source and is noted for creating the first equal ownership and compensation structure for its partners. The five equal general partners who take board seats and a hands-on approach to every entrepreneur and company they back, with no junior investment staff. Current general partners are Chetan Puttagunta, Sarah Tavel, Victor Lazarte, Peter Fenton, and Eric Vishria. Benchmark has had 37 exits since beginning of 2011; 14 IPOs and 23 M&As representing a total market value of more than $60 billion. Benchmark’s current portfolio of early-stage venture investments includes private market leaders such as Uber, Snapchat, Tinder, Stitch Fix, Elastic and Cyanogen; recent IPOs and acquisitions such as Twitter, Instagram, Yelp, League of Legends, Jasper, OpenTable, New Relic, Hortonworks, Amplitude, Confluent, GrubHub, Zendesk and Zillow; and franchise companies from Juniper to eBay to Red Hat.

Benchmark

SV Angel is a San Francisco-based venture fund. Their experience spans helping companies like Airbnb, Coinbase, Databricks, DoorDash, Faire, Flexport, GitHub, Notion, Pinterest, Snap, Square, and Stripe Scale. Over the last 30 years of investing, their core values of trust, loyalty, and integrity along with a founder-first approach have driven our strategy. They are a service organization, investing in founders who share these values. They support entrepreneurs in building lasting companies by assisting at key inflection points and leveraging networks to help them propel their businesses forward.

SV Angel

Thrive Capital is a venture capital investment firm that focuses on building and investing in Internet, software, and technology-enabled companies.

Thrive Capital

Conviction is a syndicate of global investors pursuing early stage, SaaS based disruptive tech opportunities. Conviction invests exclusively in post-revenue businesses that are disrupting their domestic markets and show the potential to grow into global enterprises with $100m revenue lines.   The Conviction partnership is led by founding shareholder Andrew Jenkins, who has invested in disruptive technologies for 10 years, most notably Mimecast, which is now Nasdaq listed at over $2bn.    Andrew is supported by Jeremy Middleton CBE, Managing Director of successful private investment company Middleton Enterprises Limited, and co-founder of home emergencies repairs business HomeServe plc, now a FTSE 250 company valued at over £2.5bn.

Conviction VC

Bond is a venture capital firm that supports visionary founders of high-growth Internet companies throughout their life cycle of innovation and growth. The firm, a spinout of the Kleiner Perkins Digital Growth Fund, was launched in January 2019 and founded by Mary Meeker with Mood Rowghani, Noah Knauf.

Bond

HeyGen

Movio is bringing the futurist way of creating videos - by turning your text into realistic spokesperson videos in minutes, right from you broswer. No actors, cameras or editing needed.  All you need is your story to tell.

HeyGen (formerly known as Movio) is a generative AI video creation platform for businesses, allowing users to create videos of virtual avatar presenters, with text inputs being converted into the avatar’s dialogue. HeyGen offers 100+ diverse avatars, over 300 templates, 300+ voices, and over 40 languages for localization. The platform is available directly via an internet browser. Use cases where HeyGen is applicable include:

Exploring the limitless possibilities of AI

Generative AI Applications

<div>HeyGen is a video platform that facilitates the creation of business videos with GenAI.</div>

Imbuing emotion into human-digital interactions

Digital Humans

HeyGen: AI-Based Video Generation Platform Company Closes $60 Million In Series A At Over $500 Million Valuation

HeyGen (formerly known as Movio) is a generative AI video creation platform for businesses, allowing users to create videos of virtual avatar presenters, with text inputs being converted into the avatar’s dialogue. HeyGen offers 100+ diverse avatars, over 300 templates, 300+ voices, and over 40 languages for localization. The platform is available directly via an internet browser. Use cases where HeyGen is applicable include:1) Product overviews: Videos to showcase product features and functionalities and improve product awareness and usage by tailoring video content to different user segments2) Scaled outreach: Personalized outreach videos and engaging, relevant, and personalized content3) Learning and development: Videos for workforce training programs.HeyGen also offers an API for integration with an organization’s platforms. In June 2023, the company rolled out a ChatGPT plugin to translate text-based interactions into video content. In November 2023, it launched "Instant Avatar," which enables customized avatar creation in just five minutes by leveraging smartphone footage.Key customers and partnershipsAs of April 2024, some of HeyGen’s customers included Uniform, VTM Advertising, and University of Central Florida.

Forethought offers a unified customer support platform based on generative AI. Its primary product is “SupportGPT,” a conversational AI chatbot that can build workflows, resolve queries, assist human agents, and fill knowledge gaps. The company targets ecommerce, FinTech, SaaS, and travel business areas.&nbsp;Forethought’s solutions include:1) Solve: A generative AI chatbot that independently handles simple but repetitive customer service tickets. The AI automatically analyzes historical customer service logs and knowledge documents to generate responses.&nbsp;2) Assist: Assists human agents by automatically generating responses to end users based on conversation history, provides context by analyzing past tickets, and draws on&nbsp; knowledge articles to help resolve queries.3) Triage: Analyzes ticket details and historical data to prioritize and route tickets to the correct agents4) Discover: Analyzes customer service history to generate new knowledge articles or recommend new workflows where gaps existForethought also offers a platform called “SupportGPT Playground,” which allows customers to train and experiment with SupportGPT using their own data. In September 2023, the company launched Autoflows that uses natural language prompts to undertake a series of tasks in order to automate customer service interactions.&nbsp;As of April 2024, Forethought’s solutions were available for integration on several customer service platforms, including Zendesk, Salesforce, ServiceNow, Freshdesk, Dialpad, Hubspot, AWS, and Talkdesk.The platform leverages <a href="https://sp-edge.com/companies/362567">OpenAI</a>’s large language models (LLMs), using the same technology as ChatGPT, along with its own algorithms to limit the data that the AI model can access. This reduces the possibility of completely incorrect responses (hallucinations)—a documented issue with unconstrained LLMs such as ChatGPT. It does this by using the algorithms to generate a query that is submitted to the large AI model as a guide, which allows responses to be more specific to a customer’s workflow.Key customers and partnershipsAt its launch in March 2023, its customers included Kickfin and Upwork. As of April 2024, Forethought’s customers included Lime, iFIT, Achievers, Q4 Inc., Etekcity, Beeline, Uncommon Goods, Spoonflower, Kajabi, PDQ, Desire2Learn, and Thumbtack.In December 2021, Forethought partnered with academic research center Mila to conduct further research in AI and ML fields to enhance customer experience. Funding and FinancialsIn December 2021, Forethought raised USD 65 million in a Series C funding round led by Steadfast Capital to accelerate growth. Total raised funding stood at USD 92 million as of April 2023. In 2021, the company reported an increase in annual recurring revenue (ARR) by 5x.&nbsp;

Forethought

Got It AI has developed a ChatGPT-like conversational chatbot for enterprise Q&amp;A applications. Its solutions include:1)&nbsp; CX Autopilot: A virtual agent solution that analyzes an organization’s customer service articles or external knowledge sources to provide accurate conversational support in customer service and employee workflow applications&nbsp;2) AutoFlows: A tool that helps analyze customer service voice, chat logs and other data to identify the dialogue paths in a given workflow and build them into a virtual agent. AutoFlows requires no code; integration with customer systems is assisted by a human team3) Hallucination Manager:&nbsp; A tool that can identify if an AI is “hallucinating,” a common issue with large language models (LLMs) causing incorrect response generation. Truth Checker is able to detect when a response generated for a customer query is irrelevant or entirely incorrect, preventing the response from being delivered to the user and providing links to knowledge articles, if so.&nbsp;For customers unwilling to use a large open-source LLM via an API or those that are unable to operate an expensive LLM on-premises, Got It offers its own proprietary Enterprise Language Model Architecture (ELMAR). Launched in March 2023, ELMAR is smaller than models like GPT-3 and can be run on readily available hardware. Combined with input scanning and Truth Checker AI, ELMAR is able to match larger models for accuracy in narrower enterprise workflows, such as customer Q&amp;A.Key customers and partnershipsGot It AI’s customers included crowdfunding website Indiegogo and baby care product brand Frida (June 2022).In October 2023, Got It AI partnered with <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/22708">NVIDIA</a> AI Solutions to integrate its ELMAR platform with NVIDIA's AI technologies.Funding and financialsGot It AI has raised a total of USD 22.5 million in funding as of April 2023 across several rounds and emerged from stealth in June 2022. Got It AI’s co-founder and venture capitalist Peter Relan has participated in several of the firm’s funding rounds.

Got It AI

Persado is a “motivation” platform generating marketing content using machine learning. The platform recognizes different customers based on their reactions to language and uses those insights to generate personalized content that engages across all channels (web, email, ads, etc.) Persado’s use cases include:1) Personalization: Identifying what content will motivate each customer to generate personalized messaging across all marketing channels2) Acquisition: Using personalized messaging for higher conversion rates in customer acquisition campaigns3) Onboarding: Personalizing content for each individual and engaging customers from the day of acquisition4) Retention: Keeping customers engaged using personalized messaging for renewals, loyalty programs, and upgrades5) Pre-collections: Promoting on-time payments using encouraging language and providing clear instructions6) Customer service: Encouraging customers to follow self-service promptsIn August 2023, Persado launched <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/21089">“Essential Motivation”, </a>to help marketers create emotionally resonant messages, to drive customer engagement and conversion rates. The company unveiled <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/27700">new features </a>to this in March 2024, including new product descriptions, segment personalization, brand alignment scores, and web copy optimization, aimed at improving marketing content effectiveness.The Persado platform, based on a proprietary language model, uses a large consumer behavior database of historical interactions (1.2 billion consumers and over 100 billion interactions as of April 2024) to determine what qualities of a message appeal to consumers. Given a set of keywords as input, it leverages deep-learning transformer models to generate messages that are most likely to bring conversions, ensuring the content is in line with a customer’s brand using specially trained language models.Over time, Persado uses machine-learning experimentation and decision-making to identify how messages cause each consumer to behave, enabling additional personalization for each future communication. The platform can also directly integrate with customer data platforms (CDPs) to leverage consumer language profiles.Persado also integrates with common marketing tools to fit into marketing teams’ workflows, providing detailed dashboards and analytics to visualize the impact of each piece of content.The company claims that its solution can increase ecommerce revenue by 3%–5%.Key customers and partnershipsPersado partnered with digital journey continuity platform Namogoo in May 2023, integrating its dynamic motivation platform with Namogoo’s customer intent and segmentation database to allow ecommerce stores to dynamically adapt their messaging for individual customers. In March 2024, it partnered with <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/27701">Bounteous x Accolite </a>to leverage Persado's language knowledge base and GenAI tools to enhance commerce and marketing experiences across diverse sectors.Persado’s customers as of April 2023 include Vanguard Group, Marks &amp; Spencer, Chase Bank, Emirates NBD, and Vodafone.

Persado

Founded in 2022, SellScale is a GenAI-driven sales and marketing outbound platform that streamlines sales communication, which originated during the founders' work on the <a href="https://www.dailydropout.fyi">DailyDropout.FYI</a> newsletter. This led to SellScale’s evolution into a comprehensive solution, where sales development representatives (SDRs) utilize it to train GPT-3 and other language models using their top-performing outbound emails. It then customizes these emails using data from CRMs and 40+ (December 2022) data sources, including social media, RSS feeds, and articles. The platform optimizes sales workflows by prioritizing prospects, streamlining follow-ups, enabling multi-threaded engagement (generating leads from multiple contacts), and automating scheduling. It also integrates with tools like Gmail, Outreach.io, Apollo, LinkedIn, and Zapier, as well as CRMs like HubSpot and Salesforce, to improve workflow efficiency.The platform claims to execute speed-to-lead processes within minutes, compared to the industry standard of 2.75 days.Key customers and partnershipsThe firm's solutions are specialized for SDRs across healthcare, FinTech, technology, and business consulting, where the firm offers specialized targeting and playbooks for the respective industries by leveraging industry-specific data. As of April 2024, its customers included Worley, Bruinen, Videra Health, and NewtonX.

SellScale

DeckRobot is a platform compatible with Microsoft PowerPoint that leverages AI to transform raw slides into enterprise-ready presentations. DeckRobot AI transforms draft slides into professional, on-brand slides by adapting graphics from a vast library of slide examples. Users can apply an unlimited number of styles to any slide deck, including old documents, client materials, or web-sourced slides.&nbsp; DeckRobot offers enhancements for individual slides, such as adding approved icons and images, object alignment, slide resizing, and text validation through AI checks. DeckRobot's plugin acts as a time-saving tool for PowerPoint users, reducing manual work and potentially saving up to 80% of working time. The plugin emphasizes creating visually appealing presentations that adhere to company brand guidelines while maintaining content quality.&nbsp; Key customers and partnerships&nbsp; As of April 2024, the company reportedly worked with 70% of the largest consulting and audit companies. .

DeckRobot

Companies that offer solutions to generate personalized marketing content including blogs, social media posts, ads, emails, website landing pages, product descriptions for ecommerce optimization, and other content for marketing campaigns.

Companies that offer solutions to generate 3D designs and digital assets (including product prototypes, artwork, novels, and interior spaces) from text prompts or uploaded images.

Companies that offer solutions to improve business processes including task automation, facilitating employee training, making resources available for employees to improve knowledge, and providing information to better respond to customer queries efficiently. Also includes solutions targeting customer analysis and strategy formulation.

Companies that provide personalized learning experiences for users to improve language skills, literacy, critical thinking, and writing skills; companies that extract data to compile and summarize research documents and podcasts as well as those that offer information gathering and analysis solutions for finance/investments.

Companies that offer AI solutions to create music, movies, and online games.

Companies that offer natural language conversational chatbots providing answers for queries instead of links.

Companies that use AI to generate code in any programming language based on human language description. Also includes companies that can generate synthetic data based on the information available (like text, images, and video data) to facilitate better data analytics and develop accurate machine learning models with synthetic training data.

Generative AI applications are built on foundation models that are trained using advanced ML models

The technology allows the creation of digital avatars and virtual games

All companies within the space offer a product or service based on generative AI

The technology allows the creation of personalized content

Some applications leverage NLP to train models to process and respond to language-based prompts

Generative AI applications are built on in-house or third-party foundation models

<div>
 
 HeyGen is a video platform that facilitates the creation of business videos with GenAI.
 
</div>

<div>
 
 Inworld AI provides an engine to build AI characters for gaming, the metaverse, VR/AR, and immersive experiences.
 
</div>

Inworld AI

<div>
 
 Soul Machines uses a cloud-based platform called Human OS to create digital humans that are highly realistic in appearance and behavior. This is achieved through the integration of various technologies such as its patented Digital Brain and Autonomous Animation Engine as well as third-party tools like conversational AI, sentiment analytics, and data integration. The Digital Brain is capable of contextualizing and adapting to different situations and can animate realistic human-like behaviors on its own.
 
</div>

Soul Machines

<div>
 
 DeepBrainAI allows the creation of digital humans for various purposes: business, recruitment, service, education, and personal. The company offers 100+ AI avatar templates to choose from and speech in 55+ languages. It also offers several digital avatar products such as AI Avatar (digital avatars for retail, banking, education, etc.), AI Human (creation of custom digital avatars), AI Studio (for creating videos), and AI Interview (digital avatars for HR tasks such as recruitment). In March 2023, the company launched its GenAI video synthesis solution, AI Studios 2.0.
 
</div>

DeepBrain AI

<div>
 
 Digital Domain is a visual effects and digital production company. Its Digital Human Group applies advanced creation techniques and proprietary technology for feature ﬁlms, real-time capture for live venue events, futuristic gaming experiences, and mobile and next-generation interactive digital human rendering.
 
</div>

Digital Domain

<div>
 
 ObEN's platform allows users to create their own digital twin by uploading a picture of themselves to the platform. Virtual celebrities, gaming, entertainment, and live streaming are noted as key uses of ObEN avatars. The avatars are designed to make interaction easy and aim to enhance the naturalness and simplicity of the virtual assistant or digital character. Once the avatar is created, users can live-stream and produce videos by transferring content to ObEN's real-time content creation platform.
 
</div>

ObEN

Digital humans that engage in two-way conversations for customer service and employee training

Digital humans that deliver responsive interactions for virtual events, social media, and entertainment

Interactive digital humans for applications in education, fashion, sports, and others

Digital humans for one-way customer and employee communications, including presentations, training modules, or informational videos, and the like

Digital humans as characters in movies, news reporting, virtual events, and television shows without two-way user interaction

Digital humans as characters for video games without two-way user interaction

Digital humans for applications in fashion, education, sports, and others without two-way user interaction

Several digital humans are integrated with GenAI models

NLP is used by digital humans to understand, process, and generate natural language

AI and ML are used in digital humans to process data and generate responses

Digital humans can be deployed in the metaverse for a variety of purposes, such as virtual customer service, virtual events, and virtual social interactions.

<div>
Video company HeyGen, operating under the umbrella of GenAI, has successfully raised USD 60 million in a Series A funding round, spearheaded by Benchmark. This significant investment has skyrocketed HeyGen's market value to over USD 500 million.
The newly acquired funds are proposed to speed up the execution of HeyGen's product plans. The goal is to boost the caliber and levels of engagement in their generated videos while fortifying their enterprise-level security. This will also promote ethical AI practices and enhance their existing trust and safety provisions. 
</div>

HeyGen

About EDGE

Contact Us

Resources

Area of Focus

Technology Research Made Effortless