Point Nine Capital is a Berlin-based venture capital firm focused exclusively on early-stage Internet investments in areas like Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), online marketplaces, and mobile. The fund and its managers, Pawel Chudzinski and Christoph Janz have backed a number of highly successful Internet companies such as Delivery Hero, Clio, Shiftplanning, Vend, Typeform, and Zendesk from their earliest stages.

Point Nine

Runa Capital is a technology-focused venture capital firm managing two funds – Runa I was launched with $135M in 2010 and has made 33 investments,  Runa II of $135M was launched in 2014 and has made 30 investmerns and Runa III was started in 2019 and is in active investment stage right now.  The fund was established to seek early stage opportunities in the rapidly growing tech sector, with the specific focus on deeptech (AI, ML, open-source), future of computing, fintech infrastructure and enterprise software. Runa brings a team with extensive operational experience and is focused on finding growth businesses that generate revenues, supporting them in the global marketplace and turning them into international champions. Founded by Ilya Zubarev, Serg Bell (founders of Parallels and Acronis) and Dmitry Chikhachev (Ericsson, Ritzio, Uvenco) Runa Capital is run by a team of successful entrepreneurs, most of whom have worked together for over 15 years. It is a united team with broad geographical and cross-industry experience, as well as an extensive professional network. Runa Capital investment team members possess an excellent track record in tech investments.

Runa Capital

Granatus Ventures is the first Armenia-based Venture Capital firm with offices in Yerevan, London and Singapore providing investment, networks and expertise to startups worldwide that leverage Armenia's potential as an emerging technology hub.

Granatus Ventures

SmartGateVC is a SoCal and Armenia based VC with a focus on pre-seed investments in AI. Krisp (the world’s best noise cancellation technology), SuperAnnotate (the fastest annotation platform and services for training AI) are among our investments (31 portfolio companies since 2018). Sierra Ventures, Upfront Ventures, AI Fund, YC, and others are among our follow-on investors. We invest out of 2 funds and our investors include Tim Draper, One Way Ventures, and other high-profile GPs, entrepreneurs, and professionals.

SmartGateVC

Fathom Capital is an early-stage VC firm focusing on enterprise applications and IT infrastructure.

Fathom Capital

Berkeley SkyDeck Fund is an investment Arm Behind UC Berkeley's SkyDeck Accelerator.

Berkeley SkyDeck Fund

Base10 is an early-stage venture capital firm investing in the automation of the real economy. They bring automation to traditional sectors of the economy.  Today, the company has backed nearly 30 companies. Base10 creates industry teams that consider what is going to happen in the next five years, and then call the companies they see playing a role. It either turns into an investment, or Base10 will follow the company for 18 months. It is based in San Francisco, California, and was founded in 2017.

Base10 Partners

Plug and Play is a seed and early-stage investor focused on great teams leading emerging growth companies.  Plug and Play runs 12 industry-specific accelerator programs twice a year, that acts as a platform for major corporations and high quality startups to connect and collaborate.  Located in the heart of Silicon Valley, Plug and Play participates in Seed, Angel and Series A funding where they often co-invest with their strategic partners. Through years of experience and as part of their network, Plug and Play has put together a world-class network of serial entrepreneurs, strategic investors, and industry leaders who actively assist the firm with its successful and growing investment portfolio.  SEED ROUND. Plug and Play participates in seed round investing through a program called Startup Camp. Startup Camp is a 10-week program based in Silicon Valley for top-notch entrepreneurs to work intensively on building out their business model. Select startups will refine their business models and prototypes with help from a combination of structured workshops, speaker series and mentorship sessions, as well as active coaching from their investment team. At the culmination of Startup Camp, founders will have crystalized their business plans and pitched their company to the venture capital community at EXPO Demo Day.''  ANGEL ROUND Plug and Play makes angel round investments throughout the year, sourced from their monthly Plug and Play Angels (PAPA) sessions. They are partnered with local angel investors in Silicon Valley who participate in PAPA to find the most promising startups and best new technologies.  SERIES A. Series A typical Series A round is in the range of $2 million to $10 million, and is intended to provide operating capital for the company for six months to two years. This round capitalizes the company as it develops its products, performs initial marketing and branding, acquires talent, and conducts other early-stage business operations. It is in this stage that Plug and Play will co-invest with over 180 venture capital partners.  Plug and Play has helped grow market leaders such as PayPal, Danger, Google, DropBox, LendingClub, Zoosk, SoundHound, CreditSesame, Skytree, and has over 400 more early-stage startups in its portfolio.

Plug and Play

SuperAnnotate

SuperAnnotate is the world's leading platform for building the highest-quality training datasets for Generative AI, LLMs, Computer vision, and NLP. With advanced tooling and QA, ML and automation features, data curation, Orchestration, and integrated workforce marketplace, we enable machine learning teams to build and manage incredibly accurate datasets and successful ML pipelines 10x faster.

SupperAnnotate offers a data annotation platform for labeling text, audio, images, videos, and LiDAR data using AI-assisted tools. The platform caters to a wide range of industries and use cases, including agriculture, healthcare, sports, robotics, aerial imagery, natural language processing, and document processing. The platform’s key features also include the ability to manage, query, and debug data; visualize data trends; fine-tune data; and automate data annotation workflows required to train ML models. Additionally, the company provides a data annotation service marketplace that comprises over 400 vetted professionally managed and multilingual annotation service teams, which help companies manually label the data. The platform also includes a project management tool that allows customers to monitor and track a project’s current progress as well as conduct comprehensive quality reviews.

The toolkit to build machine learning applications at scale

Machine Learning Infrastructure

SuperAnnotate, a computer vision platform, partners with with open-source to spread visual ML

SupperAnnotate offers a data annotation platform for labeling text, audio, images, videos, and LiDAR data using AI-assisted tools. The platform caters to a wide range of industries and use cases, including agriculture, healthcare, sports, robotics, aerial imagery, natural language processing, and document processing. The platform’s key features also include the ability to manage, query, and debug data; visualize data trends; fine-tune data; and automate data annotation workflows required to train ML models. Additionally, the company provides a data annotation service marketplace that comprises over 400 vetted professionally managed and multilingual annotation service teams, which help companies manually label the data. The platform also includes a project management tool that allows customers to monitor and track a project’s current progress as well as conduct comprehensive quality reviews.The company also provides a platform called ML Studio, which allows developers and engineers to visualize, manage, and query training data as well as automate data annotation workflows required to train ML models. Key customers and partnershipsIts notable customers include Samsung, Motorolla, IBM, and Hinge Health.In June 2020, the company partnered with OpenCV, an open-source computer vision platform, to improve the annotation process and toolsets for computer vision applications.Funding and financialsIn July 2021, SuperAnnotate raised USD 14.5 million in Series A funding led by Base10 Partners, along with participation from existing investors Point Nine Capital, Runa Capital, and Fathom Capital. It aimed to use the fresh funds for marketing.

Datagen provides a self-service synthetic data platform that generates visual synthetic data of humans for computer vision applications. The platform allows users to write their own code to generate labeled synthetic data for faces, full body, and humans in motion in the form of images and videos to test and train AI models while retaining complete control over the data. The data covers a range of computer vision tasks including face landmark detection, face and hair segmentation, facial recognition and identification, full body pose estimation, full body segmentation, and behavior detection.Key customers and partnershipsThe company serves three of the top five global technology companies and Fortune 500 companies across the automotive, smart fitness, AR/VR/metaverse, smart office, and home security industries. Its notable customers include Google, Toyota, NVIDIA, IBM, and Intel.Funding and financialsIn March 2022, the company raised USD 50 million in a Series B funding round led by Scale Venture Partners. The funds were utilized to bolster its position in the market.Datagen reported to have recorded 8x growth in revenue in 2022.

Datagen

Weights &amp; Biases offers a platform that allows users to build models with experiment tracking, data set and model versioning, data visualization, hyperparameter optimization, and model management. The platform enables users to automatically retrain and re-evaluate models and centrally manage all model versions through every lifecycle stage—from development to staging to production. It also helps to visualize comparisons between model versions to evaluate performance and identify regressions before model deployment. It also offers toolkits such as <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/19172">W&amp;B Weave and W&amp;B Production Monitoring </a>to build and monitor data- and ML-powered applications, respectively, through interactive visualizations.The company also offers a <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/17880">suite of tools (W&amp;B Prompts) </a>to support large language model operations (LLMOps). W&amp;B Prompts includes tools and features for experiment tracking, debugging, and collaboration, as well as a one-click method to evaluate and score prompts through the OpenAI Eval’s framework.The company provides the platform through a free tier and under a subscription model for up to USD 50 per user per month.Key customers and partnershipsWeights &amp; Biases served more than 700,000 ML practitioners as of August 2023. Its notable include NVIDIA, Toyota, BMW Group, Samsung, Fujifilm, Truebill, and Clear Capital.The company has <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/18663">partnered with Lambda </a>, a GPU cloud computing provider, to offer its MLOps platform integrated with the infrastructure services of the latter, catering to enterprises dealing with AI and deep-learning workloads.Funding and financialsIn August 2023, the company raised <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/20874">USD 50 million in a strategic investment </a>round at a valuation of USD 1.25 billion, led by Daniel Gross and Nat Friedman. The round also saw participation from Sapphire Ventures, Coatue, Insight Partners, and other investors. The company aimed to utilize the fresh funds to further develop its ML tools, including the launch of W&amp;B Prompts.

Weights & Biases

BentoML offers an open-source platform called Bento Cloud, for the deployment and scaling of AI applications. It is a fully managed platform that handles the complexities of AI infrastructure, providing serverless autoscaling as required during the development and production stages. The platform helps to ship models to production with advanced deployment options including online and shadow A/B testing, while also providing visibility through model performance monitoring. The platform integrates with an organization’s existing data stack and enables users to continuously deploy and improve models in production. The company offers its platform through a combination of subscription and usage-based model.In addition, BentoML also provides the following open-source platforms: 1) Yatai, for model deployment on Kubernetes and 2) bentoctl, for model deployment on any cloud platform.Key customers and partnershipsAs of January 2024, BentoML reported that over 1,000 organizations, comprising more than 3,000 members, use its platform. Its notable customers include Koo, Open Layer, Line, and Naver.The company entered into a strategic partnership with TomTom, a developer of location technology, to help integrate with various models as well as in LLM deployments.Funding and financialsThe company raised <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/19684">USD 9 million in seed funding </a>in June 2023 led by DCM Ventures, with participation from Bow Capital. It aimed to channel the newly acquired funds to enhance its platform and offer developers a range of tools for building, deploying, and scaling AI applications efficiently.

BentoML

Iguazio provides a serverless platform based on its open-source Nuclio framework that helps users to develop, deploy, and manage real-time AI applications without requiring them to manually manage underlying infrastructures such as servers and storage. The platform creates real-time intelligence for applications located at the edge, public cloud, and on-premise data centers and reduces bandwidth constraints by consolidating data into a repository and making it available for applications as required. The platform can ingest and transform data from any source, which is then used to train, evaluate, deploy, and monitor models in production.The company leverages Big Data and ML software such as Apache Spark, TensorFlow, and Kubernetes to manage software containers that enable applications to run across different computing environments.Key customers and partnershipsIguazio serves customers in the financial services, telecommunications, smart mobility, manufacturing, retail, AdTech, gaming, healthcare, energy, and utilities sectors. Notable customers include Samsung, Microsoft, NVIDIA, AWS, Google, and Intel.Funding and financialsIn January 2020, the company raised USD 24 million in a funding round led by INCapital Ventures. The funds were utilized to accelerate its growth, expand its reach into new global markets, grow sales, and facilitate new sales channels that include companies such as Dell Technologies

Iguazio

Cogito Tech provides image and video annotation to generate computer vision training data sets for ML &amp; deep learning (DL). The video annotation solution leverages AI-powered tools to convert video into a sequence of images and generates training data sets for ML-based AI models, including self-driving cars and drones. The AI model understands and derives insights from visual data to detect, identify, classify, and track objects in an image or video. Cogito also provides virtual assistants and chatbots to help users in the process of training ML algorithms. Cogito Tech also provides high-quality, ethically sourced datasets that are compliant and reliable to train ML models.In addition, the company provides services to fine-tune LLMs and GenAI applications through reinforcement learning techniques as well as stress test models through red teaming.Key customers and partnershipsAs of December 2022, the company served more than 150 customers across 25 countries in the retail, medical, automotive, agriculture, robotics, smart cities, security, and manufacturing industries. Notable customers includes Verizon Media, The University of Sydney, National Geographic, Tumblr, and Vimeo.

Cogito Tech

Platforms and frameworks that help developers build and train ML models.

Platforms that deploy and host the trained and tested models in production and integrate them into applications through APIs.

Platforms that generate artificial data that mimics the characteristics of real data, which is then used to train ML models at scale.

Platforms that help monitor and manage ML models in training and deployment to track performance, conduct variance analysis, and optimize performance.

Makers of hardware such as CPUs, GPUs, and other application-specific hardware required to train and run ML workloads.

Integrated solutions that handle the end-to-end processes of developing, training, deploying, and monitoring ML models.

Data exchange providers and platforms that offer data labeling services via manual and/or software methods, which are used as input to train ML models.

Includes companies that provide infrastructure to build AI/ML applications

Provides tools to build, monitor, and deploy GenAI applications

Industry is focused on offering platforms for other businesses to build AI-/ML-powered apps

SuperAnnotate

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