Kindred Ventures is a seed-stage venture capital fund that supports startup companies. The company prefers to invest in the software, healthcare, telecommunications, retail, climate technology, and consumer industries. It is based in San Francisco, California, and was founded in 2014 by Steve Jang and Kanyi Maqubela.

Kindred Ventures

Remagine Ventures is a seed and pre-seed venture firm based in Israel that invests in how consumers spend their time and money online. It has focused on being the first cheque investor in ambitious founders building the future of gaming, Metaverse, and consumer tech since its inception in 2018. It collaborates closely with its corporate partners to facilitate commercial opportunities and shorten the time to market.

Remagine Ventures

Galaxy Interactive is a venture capital firm focused on interactive content and technology companies.

Galaxy Interactive

We connect, support and invest in the world's top technologists.

Amaranthine

Backing technical and repeat founders across Europe & US.

Tapestry VC

Insight Partners is a global software investor that partners with growth-stage technology and software companies. Insight has a deep focus in Fintech, Cybersecurity, AI/ML, DevOps, and Healthcare sectors. Across their people and their portfolio, they encourage a culture around a core belief growth equals opportunity. As of December 31, 2022, the firm has over $75B in regulatory assets under management. Insight Partners has invested in more than 750 companies worldwide and has seen over 55 portfolio companies achieve an IPO.

Insight Partners

Cerca Partners is a leading co-investment VC fund with a sustainable advantage of unique insights and access to the best startup investment opportunities in Israel. Powered by a community and network of global tech entrepreneurs and top-tier Venture Capital funds, the fund provides both the expertise and the finesse required in an innovative and fast paced international market. Cerca's strong network and community comprises Israel’s most successful tech entrepreneurs as well as tech and business executives in a variety of verticals. Their accumulated experience helps us make smart investment decisions and provides our entrepreneurs with invaluable guidance and mentorship.

Cerca Partners

LaunchBay is a venture firm specialising in FinTech Infrastructure, B2B Software, and AI applications, investing in companies at the point where they have demonstrated product-market fit and are ready to scale. With headquarters in London, UK, and Tel Aviv, Israel, Launchbay has built a global presence with strong connections in the local ecosystems in which the team operates and an active investment and portfolio construction approach.    Launchbay supports technology companies across three main pillars: - a flagship access fund for early-stage investments,  - a growth fund for selected later-stage opportunities,  and  - a proprietary digital investment platform that facilitates primary and secondary deals across various stages Data-driven decision-making is a key aspect, where we utilize algorithms and scoring within the platform to address industry-wide challenges related to access and liquidity.    Launchbay takes a particular interest in founders with an immigrant background because we recognize the distinct perspective, drive, and ambition that often accompany building successful businesses outside of one's home country. We believe in the success stories of the vision, capabilities, and growth potential demonstrated by founders with this type of experience.

Launchbay Capital

Hour One

Hour One AI develops a video creation and management platform built for the world of work. It harnesses computer-generated AI people in photo-real quality to digitize and optimize the traditional video production process. All of Hour One’s video creation is located in the cloud, making it possible for any business to create and use high-quality presenter videos at a fraction of the cost, in minutes, in any language, self-serve, and at a high scale.

Hour One is a Tel Aviv-based firm developing an AI-powered video generation tool, with virtual human presenters for business content. The platform offers a range of video templates, voices, avatars, and over 100 languages for video generation, and also allows users to create their own avatars. Users can make their selections and input a text prompt which the avatar will use to speak. The platform’s use cases include:

Exploring the limitless possibilities of AI

Generative AI Applications

<div>Hour One, through its self-service creators platform, allows users to create videos featuring digital humans.</div>

Imbuing emotion into human-digital interactions

Digital Humans

The minds behind Hour One’s hyper-realistic avatars

Hour One is a Tel Aviv-based firm developing an AI-powered video generation tool, with virtual human presenters for business content. The platform offers a range of video templates, voices, avatars, and over 100 languages for video generation, and also allows users to create their own avatars. Users can make their selections and input a text prompt which the avatar will use to speak. The platform’s use cases include:1) Learning and development: Production of product tutorials, sales and compliance training, and employee development videos2) Human resources: Enhances outreach to potential candidates and personalizes onboarding processes and internal communications without requiring the time and effort of an HR team3) News: Allows generation of branded company updates, multilingual news, and timely breaking news updates without a human anchor and film crew4) E-learning: Converts text-based learning materials to video format5) Language learning: Multilingual videos for language tutorials6) Real estate: Personalized advertising for real estate listings7) Ecommerce: Advertising of ecommerce stores and products8) IT training: Videos for IT training courses.Hour One also offers collaboration tools, captioning tools, and a brand kit for aligning generated videos with a company’s content. An API is available for the connection of an organization’s platforms to enable bulk import of prompts for the generation of videos.Hour One uses a proprietary text-to-video and text-to-virtual human foundational model.&nbsp;

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>
 
 Hour One, through its self-service creators platform, allows users to create videos featuring digital humans.
 
</div>

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

Berlitz Corporation

To create AI-based, realistic, photoreal characters that can speak any text in any language.

Modern tools to train and motivate staff, and bridge emerging skill gaps.

EdTech: Corporate Learning

Learning content | Career development includes providers of content libraries and customized courses focusing on learning and developing skills directly related to job roles and careers (including hard skills, soft skills, and skills in demand). Delivery styles are varied and include in-person or virtual classrooms, mobile learning, and micro-learning. A variety of technologies may be employed such as video-based learning, artificial intelligence-based (AI-based) and adaptive learning, augmented reality (AR), and virtual reality (VR).

Hour One

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