Reports stated that Scale AI and Cohere. are trying to pitch investors for hundreds of millions of dollars The startups join a growing group of AI developers who are said to be currently in talks for huge funding rounds. A January story from Bloomberg says that Figure AI Inc., a company that makes AI-powered humanoid robots, wants $500 million. One report says that Anthropic intends to raise $750 million. Another report says that OpenAI will also raise money at a value that could go over $100 billion.
Accel is reportedly in discussions about launching a fresh round of funding for Scale AI. It is believed that the round will be worth a lot of money. Sources said that the deal will raise the value of Scale AI by 80% to around $13 billion.
Several market participants, including OpenAI, rely on training data provided by Scale AI. Customers can use a graphical interface to specify the data they need for specific tasks with the company’s flagship product, the Scale Generative AI Data Engine. After that, with the help of automatic quality assurance tools, a group of human experts puts together the necessary files.
Scale AI’s platform provides more features as well. The business claims that users may find any cybersecurity problems and check the validity of their AI models’ output with this tool. It also aids the development of better training datasets used to create the driving software for autonomous vehicles.
The business laid off 20% of its employees in January last year. It admitted at the time that 2021 and 2022 were very good years for sales but that “the macro environment has changed dramatically in recent quarters.” The fact that the company is reportedly seeing solid sales growth again suggests that it is poised to raise investment at a valuation of $13 billion, which is twice its last acquisition.
A few hours before it, Bloomberg disclosed that Cohere, too, is attempting to raise capital. The deal’s potential closing price is $5 billion, which is twice the company’s value from last year. According to Bloomberg’s sources, the AI company is aiming to secure funding of $500 million or more from investors.
Cohere specializes in building enterprise-level language models. Earlier this month, the business unveiled their newest LLM, Command R. With its ten languages support, ability to communicate with external apps, and 128,000 token capacity, it can ingest instructions with ease.
Aya is the name of the new LLM that Cohere published a few weeks ago. Its support for 101 languages is more than double that of previous open-source models. Together, Aya and the dataset that was used to construct the model. which includes over 513 million AI queries and responses, were made public by Cohere.
Among other institutional investors, Cohere has already garnered around $440 million in capital from Oracle Corp., Nvidia Corp., Salesforce Inc., and others. In June of last year, the firm raised $270 million, valuing the business at $2.2 billion.
