Tag Archives: artificial intelligence (AI)

Simon AI Launches Agentic Marketing Platform to Unlock Data for Contextual Personalization

.406 Ventures

Simon AI acts as a marketer’s data and execution team, uncovering hidden signals, activating real-world context, and accelerating high-performing launches that elevate customer experiences

 

NEW YORK — Sept. 15, 2025 — Simon AI, formerly known as Simon Data, today announced the launch of the Simon AI™ Agentic Marketing Platform, to enable marketing teams at fast-growing and enterprise brands to break free from the limitations and trade-offs that hold back high-performing personalization. With Simon AI, marketers set business goals, then purpose-built agents turn live customer and contextual data into adaptive campaigns that deliver higher conversion, increase customer lifetime value, and drive measurable growth.

Personalization previously took weeks to months to execute. Now, Simon AI Agents identify signals and patterns, prepare data for execution, and automate high-volume micro-segmentation into engagement channels. As a result, marketing is now fast and nimble enough to activate customer moments, elevating both scale and performance.

“Agentic AI is changing how marketing gets done, representing the biggest shift since the move to SaaS and cloud computing,” said Jason Davis, co-founder and CEO of Simon AI. “Until now, marketers have faced a painful trade-off — launch more campaigns and watch performance drop, or push for deeper personalization and lose volume. With Simon AI, that trade-off ends.

“Agentic Marketing is a new model where embedded agents operate across the most complex workflows on an AI-first, composable CDP, accessing all customer and contextual data live in the data cloud. Simon AI Agents can reason over that data, enrich it, and execute at a scale that was previously impossible. Now, marketing teams can finally overcome the data and execution complexity that has held personalization back.”

Solving Data and Execution Complexity for Marketers

For most brands, personalization is still constrained by four challenges:

  • Data access: Marketers can’t get the right signals in time to act.
  • Execution bottlenecks: Campaigns take weeks to launch, making “real-time” and “continuous” impossible.
  • The missing context: First-party data leaves out signals like weather, inventory, and trends that drive customer decisions.
  • AI acceleration: Teams use surface-level AI tools for content generation and predictive analysis, yet struggle to apply AI to the most complex marketing problems that are blockers to insight and execution.

Together, these challenges prevent marketing teams from achieving true personalization — and they define why a new way of marketing and a new solution are needed.

The Simon AI Agentic Marketing Platform

Simon AI combines a goal-based workflow, agents that deliver insights and automate execution, and an AI-first composable CDP powered by best-in-class integrations. With unified customer and contextual data in a brand’s existing cloud data environment, real-world signals define audiences and trigger messaging, adaptive campaigns launch faster, and personalization executes with governance and control.

Simon AI Personalization Studio

The workspace where marketers turn strategy into performance. The Personalization Studio starts with goals, not static segments, and gives teams a guided environment to connect data to campaigns that adapt automatically to live signals. With it, marketers can:

  • Define business goals in plain language and turn them into data-driven campaigns.
  • Use Blueprints—reusable playbooks that translate goals into strategies and execution plans—to guide agents and launch thousands of micro-campaigns.
  • Continuously evolve campaigns with AI Fields and AI Moments. AI Fields create new attributes about customers or products, such as a “Cold-weather readiness score” or “Price sensitivity”. AI Moments detect and operationalize real-world triggers, such as a weather swing, social trend, or inventory change, that signal when to act.
  • Automate execution across every channel—engagement platforms, owned channels, and paid media—with campaigns that stay aligned to outcomes.

Simon AI Agents

The marketer’s data and execution team that builds personalization based on insights and customer moments. Agents handle the complexity of surfacing signals, preparing data, and activating campaigns so that marketers can focus on strategy, creative, and customers. With Simon AI Agents, marketers can:

  • Detect hidden signals such as churn risk, demand spikes, inventory changes, weather, and social trends.
  • Transform messy customer and contextual data into campaign-ready attributes.
  • Orchestrate workflows and activation across platforms like Braze, Attentive, Iterable, and more.

Simon AI Composable CDP

The data foundation and semantic layer that makes AI work. Running natively in your cloud, the composable CDP makes customer and contextual data actionable, enables high-volume personalization, and enriches the enterprise source of truth. With the AI-first CDP, marketing teams can:

  • Explore and activate all customer, business, and contextual signals.
  • Run personalization directly on live data with zero ETL pipelines.
  • Enrich data and write back new fields, segments, and results into the data cloud for enterprise use.
  • Maintain enterprise-grade governance and control inside the data warehouse.

What It Means for Customers

With Simon AI, brands accelerate differentiation and growth by launching campaigns frequently, acting on more signals, and scaling personalization without trade-offs. Early adopters have reported:

  • Rapid execution of contextually relevant campaigns.
  • Higher conversion rates driven by contextual signals and adaptive personalization.
  • Material revenue growth, powered by more campaigns in market at a greater speed.

The New Model: Agentic Marketing

AI is reshaping how brands engage customers. To compete, marketers must act on 100x more signals, make 100x more decisions, and run thousands of micro-campaigns. Simon AI introduces Agentic Marketing — a new model that removes bottlenecks, unlocks insights, and gives marketers direct control of fast, precise personalization:

  • AI-Powered Execution: Agents handle insights, data preparation, and orchestration as part of the marketing team. Campaigns adapt quickly to live customer and contextual data, scaling personalization without overhead.
  • Contextual Personalization with Real-World Signals: Marketers see customers in full context, connecting profiles and behavior to signals like inventory, weather, and trends. Marketing moves past assumptions and acts on what matters now.
  • Marketer-First, Goal-Based Workflows: Instead of starting with static segments, marketers define business goals. Agents turn those goals into personalized campaigns that launch faster and continuously optimize as new signals emerge.

Alongside the launch of the Simon AI Agentic Marketing Platform, the company has rebranded from Simon Data to Simon AI, reflecting its evolution into an AI-first company. The new name underscores the central role of agentic AI in enabling personalization and highlights the value of connecting data to execution through AI.

Visit simon.ai to learn more and connect with our team to see how Simon AI works.

About Simon AI

Simon AI empowers marketing teams with the data, tools, and support needed to deliver personalized experiences for each customer across every touchpoint. The platform combines an AI-first, composable customer data platform with AI agents, enabling marketers to start with a goal while agents analyze signals, create attributes, identify triggers, and orchestrate campaigns that continuously adapt to meet that goal. By uncovering hidden signals, activating 100x more customer and contextual data, and automating execution across engagement channels, Simon AI allows even small teams to perform like much larger ones. Leading brands such as ASOS, SeatGeek, and others rely on Simon to turn complex data into faster launches, personalized experiences at scale, and revenue-driving performance. Visit simon.ai to learn more.

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GreenLite Raises $49.5M Series B to Advance the Privatization of Construction Permitting with AI-Powered Solutions

Insight Venture

Walgreens, O’Reilly Auto Parts, and TD Bank are among the Fortune 500 companies using GreenLite’s AI-driven Private Plan Review for permitting efficiency

NEW YORK, Sept. 15, 2025 /PRNewswire/ — GreenLite, the construction technology company accelerating permit timelines by 75% through AI-powered plan review and compliance solutions, today announced a Series B funding round of $49.5M, led by global software investor Insight Partners with participation from Energize Capital, as well as existing investors Craft Ventures, LiveOak Ventures, and Chicago Ventures. GreenLite will utilize the new capital to expand its go-to-market efforts and enter new verticals, including lodging, industrial and logistics, clean energy infrastructure, and residential development, while further advancing its AI-powered technology platform.

As demand for construction surges, jurisdictions and building departments face unprecedented challenges, including labor shortages, limited adoption of technology, and rising backlogs.

This strain is renewing focus on technologies and policies for permitting solutions, including Private Plan Review (PPR), where qualified third-party experts conduct official code compliance reviews instead of the city. Nearly a quarter of U.S. states have advanced legislation for PPR in the past three years, aiming to reduce delays and streamline development. Today, GreenLite is the only Private Provider combining regulatory expertise with AI to deliver PPR at a national scale.

“The permitting backlog is holding back America’s ability to build at the scale and speed we need,” said James Gallagher, Co-Founder and CEO of GreenLite. “By combining a growing database of proprietary compliance comments with advanced automation, we’re catching violations faster and providing builders, developers, and jurisdictions with the predictability and transparency they need to move projects forward, dramatically transforming the plan review and construction code compliance process.”

GreenLite’s AI-powered digital plan review tool, LiteTable, rapidly ingests plan sets, identifies compliance flags and code requirements, and surfaces relevant guidance from GreenLite’s extensive comment library based on compliance patterns within specific jurisdictions. Today, GreenLite is trusted by nearly a hundred Fortune 500 customers, including retailers, REITs, quick service restaurants, industrial owner-developers, and production home builders to advance permitting nationwide. The company is expanding into lodging, logistics, multifamily, and additional verticals this year.

“GreenLite’s full-stack Private Plan Review approach delivers building permits in days, not months, and is driving growth in America’s local communities and economies,” said Jeff Horing, Co-founder and Managing Director at Insight Partners. “We’re thrilled to back GreenLite as it continues to partner with the commercial sector and local governments to power the future of construction permitting.”

GreenLite was founded in 2022 by James Gallagher and Ben Allen, former Gopuff executives. The company has 50 full-time employees today, and is actively hiring across engineering, product, sales, marketing, operations, and executive roles.

To learn more about GreenLite’s AI-powered permitting and private plan review capabilities, please visit: https://greenlite.com/.

About GreenLite:
GreenLite is transforming how America builds by streamlining the permitting process for developers, builders, and local governments. GreenLite pioneered AI-powered Private Plan Review (PPR), where third-party experts, supported by proprietary software, conduct official code compliance reviews instead of cities.

Its technology accelerates approvals by scanning plan sets, identifying code violations, and surfacing jurisdiction-specific guidance from a large and growing proprietary database of compliance comments. With a team of in-house architects, engineers, and plan examiners, GreenLite helps customers reduce revisions, avoid delays, and cut weeks or months off their permitting timelines.

Trusted by nearly 100 national brands, GreenLite is reshaping the future of permitting across industries from retail and banking to logistics, lodging, and multifamily development. Learn more at https://www.greenlite.com.

About Insight Partners:
Insight Partners is a global software investor partnering with high-growth technology, software, and Internet startup and ScaleUp companies that are driving transformative change in their industries. As of June 30, 2025, the firm has over $90B in regulatory assets under management. Insight Partners has invested in more than 875 companies worldwide and has seen over 55 portfolio companies achieve an IPO. Headquartered in New York City, Insight has a global presence with leadership in London, Tel Aviv, and the Bay Area. Insight’s mission is to find, fund, and work successfully with visionary executives, providing them with tailored, hands-on software expertise along their growth journey, from their first investment to IPO. For more information on Insight and all its investments, visit insightpartners.com or follow us on X @insightpartners.

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Penguin Ai Accelerates Agentic AI for Healthcare with Snowflake Ventures Investment

Snowflake

Across every industry, organizations are adopting AI to drive new efficiencies and improve decision-making. The healthcare industry is complex and highly regulated. Compliance with regulatory statutes is mandatory, given the myriad rules around protected health information (PHI). The first step on the AI journey is building a robust data foundation, governance and security framework. Solving this challenge requires a new approach that can navigate these intricacies and unlock true efficiency.

The healthcare industry also expects an outcomes-driven approach to AI. That’s why we are thrilled to announce that Snowflake Ventures is investing in industry-AI disruptors like Penguin Ai to deliver innovations purpose-built for healthcare.

Penguin Ai has built a full-service, enterprise-grade AI platform to empower healthcare organizations to embrace AI with confidence and drive measurable outcomes across both the payer and provider ecosystem.

Founded in 2024 by the former chief data officer at Kaiser Permanente, United Healthcare and Optum, Penguin Ai delivers powerful, compliant AI solutions that reimagine complex healthcare workflows. The platform offers pre-trained AI models and sophisticated AI-based Digital Workers and Agents that automate high-cost, high-volume and data-intensive tasks. These include critical back-office processes like: prior authorization, medical coding, and HCC risk coding.

With this investment, Penguin Ai will bring its agentic AI solutions to the Snowflake Marketplace through a series of Snowflake Native Apps, empowering our customers to deploy fine-tuned healthcare LLMs and AI agents. This integration keeps sensitive data within the customer’s own Snowflake account and is designed to accelerate key industry workflows:

  • For payers: Streamline prior authorization, optimize claims processing, enhance HCC coding and risk analysis, appeals and grievances management, and payment integrity.
  • For providers: Automate medical coding, modernize document management and fax processing, streamline denials and appeals management, and accounts receivable (A/R) recovery.
  • For revenue cycle management: Enhance claims processing, enable AI-assisted billing and revenue capture, and automate denials and appeals.

At Snowflake, our mission is to help every enterprise achieve its full potential through data and AI. This investment brings Penguin Ai’s specialized applications into the Snowflake AI Data Cloud, giving our healthcare customers a powerful new way to accelerate their AI journey.

Get ready for Penguin Ai’s Snowflake Native App, launching soon on Snowflake Marketplace. To see how Snowflake is already empowering the industry, explore our solutions for healthcare and life sciences here.

Ebook

The Snowflake Life Sciences Playbook for AI, Apps and Data Collaboration

Explore 4 key industry use cases and over 10 leading AI, apps and data solutions.

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Nea – From Algorithms to Atoms: Our Investment in CuspAI

NEa

It’s often said that the next decade is the age of atoms rather than bits. We believe advances in the latter will unlock breakthroughs in the former.

Looking at the evolution of intelligent systems, we can identify three distinct eras:

  1. First came the era of systems built on formal (mathematical) models and simulations, generating synthetic data and reasoning within well-defined, logic-driven, and largely deterministic representations of the world. Manual experiments by scientists persisted in this first era and were essential for validating and calibrating the models and simulations.
  2. Next was the era of systems that learned directly from large-scale experimental data, using statistical and probabilistic methods to capture patterns and make predictions from observed reality.
  3. The emerging era will blend these paradigms into agentic, closed-loop systems that can define goals, design and run simulations, select viable paths, commission physical experiments, interpret results, and adapt their strategies iteratively without human micromanagement. By tightly coupling in-silico design with real-world validation in rapid feedback cycles, these systems will accelerate computational discovery and extend intelligent problem-solving into complex domains of the physical world.

CuspAI is spearheading this emerging era in computational materials science, where novel materials can be generated, synthesized, tested and validated in months instead of the 10-20 year horizon the industry has learned to expect. Based in Cambridge, UK with teams across Amsterdam and Berlin, CuspAI has demonstrated exceptional vision and execution: building state-of-the-art models, partnering with industry leaders across different domains, and gathering a stellar team with more than 2 million citations collectively. The company’s innovative approach to computational materials science aligns perfectly with our investment philosophy in backing exceptional talent with a pragmatic approach to solving world-changing problems in high-impact industries. And that is why we are thrilled to have led their Series A financing round.

Why Materials Science?

Materials underpin nearly everything: the homes and infrastructure we build; energy generation, storage, and transmission; mobility and aerospace; computing, communications, and sensing; clean water and food systems; health care and medical devices; textiles and packaging; and national security. Advancements here ripple across the economy.

Historically, discovering a new material is slow and expensive – often a decade or more and tens to hundreds of millions of dollars from idea to deployment[1].

CuspAI’s platform uses inverse design – starting with target properties and working backward to propose candidates – then evaluates stability, performance, and manufacturability through fast feedback loops. In practice, that means high-fidelity simulations, learned surrogate models, degradation pathway modeling, and constraint-aware generation informed by experimental data.

The acceleration of materials discovery enables:

  • Addressing emerging challenges. e.g., filtration of PFAS (“forever chemicals”) from drinking water and industrial discharge.
  • Tackling persistent bottlenecks. e.g., safer solid-state electrolytes, longer-cycle batteries, low-loss power electronics, corrosion-resistant coatings, high-performance membranes for desalination and gas separation. 
  • Anticipate future demand. e.g., lightweight, high-temperature alloys for aerospace; rare-earth-lean magnets; thermal interface materials for data centers; recyclable or bio-derived polymers for packaging and apparel.

Why CuspAI?

We believe CuspAI has amassed a set of unique resources and strategies that are unparalleled in this space:

Professor Max Welling and Dr. Chad Edwards, co-founders of CuspAI

Stellar, interdisciplinary team: CuspAI is led by a highly reputable, interdisciplinary team that brings together deep expertise in ML, computational chemistry, and industrial process engineering — as exemplified by the co-founders.

  • Dr. Chad Edwards (Co-founder & CEO) was previously the Commercial Co-Founder of Cambridge Quantum Computing (CQC). He later served as VP of Strategic Partnerships and Global Head of Strategy at Quantinuum following CQC’s merger with Honeywell.
  • Professor Max Welling (Co-founder & CTO) is a Professor at University of Amsterdam, and previously VP Technology at Qualcomm AI Research and Distinguished Scientist at Microsoft Research. He is considered a pioneer in AI’s application to science, variational inference, probabilistic deep learning, and geometric deep learning.

Focus on large scale, curated data collection: CuspAI recognizes that high-quality, large-scale data is foundational to building state-of-the-art models. The team has made early and deliberate investments in building proprietary datasets at scale, including MOFs, to enable models that are both high-performing and generalizable across material classes. In addition, CuspAI runs tight integrations with downstream experimental data pipelines for simulation, synthesis, and testing workflows. This is also complemented by academic and scientific literature through licensing agreements.

Partnering with industry leaders across various domains: CuspAI partners directly with commercially successful businesses and industry leaders to drive impact at scale – aligning closely with partners’ priorities, and building deep collaborations across sectors like energy, climate, automotive, and semiconductors. In addition, CuspAI has assembled a distinguished advisory board that includes Nobel laureate Geoff Hinton (Turing Award laureate, deep learning pioneer), Yann LeCun (Turing Award laureate, Chief AI Scientist at Meta), Lord John Browne (former CEO of BP), Martin van den Brink (former President & CTO of ASML), Verity Harding (former Global Head of Policy at DeepMind), and Prof. Kristin Person (a leading figure in materials science).

Achieving SOTA model performance: CuspAI’s core model stack is fully proprietary, designed to cover end-to-end materials discovery lifecycle from micro-scale design (molecular and atomic levels) to macro-level deployment (process and manufacturability). The CuspAI platform includes a suite of generative models like MOFGEN, a state-of-the-art autoregressive transformer for metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) that achieves a VUN (valid, unique, novel) rate of 49%, which outperforms by a large margin models from Microsoft (10%) and Meta (16%)[2]. Unlike simpler inorganic generators, MOFGEN produces highly complex, synthesizable structures validated against strict physical and chemical constraints and tested against experimental data generated from industry partners.

The Future of Materials

We believe that CuspAI will play a crucial role in shaping the future of materials discovery for generations to come, and will touch many aspects of our physical world from the chips powering our machines to ensuring the sustainability of our environment.

With our investment, CuspAI will be able to accelerate its research and development efforts, expand its market reach, and further solidify its position as a leader in the domain. We are thrilled to partner with Chad, Max, and the entire CuspAI team. Their vision and ambition have the potential to reshape the world, and we can’t wait to be part of that journey.

by Lila Tretikov, Philip Chopin, Andrew Schoen and Aya Somai

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TERN Group Raises $24M to Tackle the Global Healthcare Workforce Shortage with AI

RTP Global

Healthcare systems around the world are under immense strain. Demand for care is rising, but workforce capacity isn’t keeping pace. The World Health Organisation predicts that the global healthcare industry will face a shortfall of 18 million healthcare workers by 2030.

Talented and skilled professionals can be deployed to fill these gaps globally, but the systems for healthcare providers to source and relocate global talent are broken. TERN Group offers a solution.

Tackling healthcare problems at scale

After building category-defining businesses across Europe and India, including multinational online used car marketplace Cars24 and PropTech platform IMMO, Avinav Nigam teamed up with Krishna Ramkumar, whose background spans BCG, Nexus Venture Partners and social impact ventures. They launched TERN Group in 2023, inspired by first-hand experiences of the complexities of relocation and migration, as well as the acute skilled talent shortage across the UK, Europe and the Gulf.

Together, they have built the world’s first AI Clinical Workforce Platform. It’s designed for healthcare providers to connect with the global talent they require, with support for sourcing, credentialing, training, and onboarding. TERN Group’s platform vastly improves on the slow and bureaucratic processes typical of international recruitment with a combination of AI-driven workflows and human-led support for training, relocation and settlement.

Importantly, the platform delivers a far more positive experience for both sides of the hiring contract. Healthcare providers access talent fast and more predictably, while talented professionals begin their global careers with dignity and confidence, free of unethical recruitment practices.

Today, London-headquartered TERN Group employs a team of 133 people worldwide across core markets of Germany, UK, UAE, KSA, Japan and the USA. It’s trusted by over 100 healthcare clients and is supporting a global talent pool of 650,000+ professionals across 13 countries.

The future of healthcare talent mobility

Having expanded from one to six core markets this past year, TERN Group is now focused on strengthening its foothold across these markets in addition to accelerating the development of its AI Clinical Workforce platform and ramping up investment in international talent preparation.

We’re delighted to be partnering with Avinav and team through this next phase of growth as an investor in TERN Group’s $24M Series A funding round. You can read more about that raise in Entrepreneur.

Commenting on the raise, Galina Chifina, CEO of RTP Global, said: “At RTP Global, we love backing founders who take on big challenges with heart. Avinav and Krishna are just those founders – solving problems they’ve lived and felt. With TERN, they’re reimagining global talent mobility in a way that’s ethical, scalable, and deeply human, turning it into a powerful, tech-driven solution. We can’t wait to see how TERN will continue to change lives across borders, and we’re delighted to back them on this journey.”

Skilled worker shortages are a truly global challenge. TERN is rising to that challenge with an appropriately global solution that combines AI-driven agility with human support for an end-to-end solution to transform skilled talent mobility.

With AI at its core and scale on the horizon, TERN Group is redefining how healthcare talent moves across the world.

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CoreWeave Launches Ventures Group to Invest in Future of AI

CoreWeave Ventures

LIVINGSTON, N.J. – September 9, 2025 – CoreWeave (Nasdaq: CRWV), the AI Hyperscaler™, today announced the launch of CoreWeave Ventures, a new initiative committed to backing founders and companies developing the platforms and technologies shaping the AI ecosystem and the next frontier of computing.

As AI adoption expands across industries, demand for purpose-built infrastructure, tools, and applications continues to grow. By providing investment resources, technical expertise, and compute, CoreWeave Ventures enables founders to bring new ideas to market faster.

“We started CoreWeave with the conviction that AI’s true promise required a cloud platform built from the ground up to optimize for AI specific workloads. It took audacity, humility, and the support of other believers who helped us create the cloud platform of choice for many of the largest AI labs and enterprises” said Brannin McBee, Co-founder and Chief Development Officer, CoreWeave. “Our aim with CoreWeave Ventures is to give other audacious, like-minded founders the support they need to drive technical advancements and bring to market the next class of innovation.”

CoreWeave Ventures supports founders in driving the development of their platforms by providing:

  • Variety of capital investment models to help companies scale.
  • Accelerated access to the CoreWeave  cloud platform purpose-built for AI.
  • Testing environments across production-grade performance clusters to fast track new real-world use cases in AI.
  • Insights on product and go-to-market strategies shaped by CoreWeave’s relationships with hundreds of enterprises and AI-first organizations.
  • Opportunities for deep technical alignment through technology partnerships and integrations.

“Working with CoreWeave has given us the freedom to think bigger and move faster,” said Naeem Talukdar, co-founder and Chief Executive Officer, Moonvalley. “They understand the challenges of scaling breakthrough technologies and have backed us with the kind of support that lets us focus on innovation. We’re grateful to have a partner that invests in both our company and the future we’re trying to create.”

CoreWeave Ventures supports founders with the resources to create impact from day one, ranging from direct capital investment and compute-for-equity transactions to technical collaboration and go-to-market opportunities. CoreWeave Ventures is already working with a diverse group of innovators, from foundational model developers building novel large language models to pioneers in vertical AI applications and infrastructure.

To learn more about CoreWeave Ventures, visit:  www.coreweave.com/ventures or email ventures@coreweave.com.

‍About CoreWeave

CoreWeave, the AI Hyperscaler™, delivers a cloud platform of cutting-edge software powering the next wave of AI. The company’s technology provides enterprises and leading AI labs with cloud solutions for accelerated computing. Since 2017, CoreWeave has operated a growing footprint of data centers across the US and Europe. CoreWeave was ranked as one of the TIME100 most influential companies and featured on Forbes Cloud 100 ranking in 2024. Learn more at www.coreweave.com.

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SurveyMonkey launches new AI Analysis Suite and design tools, unlocking clear insights and beautiful surveys without the complicated process

Stg Partners

SurveyMonkey today announced its latest SurveyMonkey AI innovations, including a new AI Analysis Suite and supercharged survey creation tools. The new features are designed to help users ask better questions, make smarter decisions, and move faster.

“SurveyMonkey has always been in the business of capturing real human sentiment and turning it into action,” said Meera Vaidyanathan, Chief Product Officer at SurveyMonkey. “AI now lets us do this faster and smarter—automating the legwork, surfacing insights that were previously hidden, and helping our customers act with greater confidence. With 25 years of history and more than 100 billion questions answered, we’re uniquely positioned to deliver trusted AI that makes feedback not just easier to gather, but far more powerful.”

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Mistral: AI for tomorrow’s enterprise

Index Ventures

Mistral cofounders: Timothée Lacroix, Arthur Mensch, Guillaume Lample

INDEX PERSPECTIVE

By Julia Andre

Strong relationships create their own serendipity. A few years ago, my colleague Jan Hammer and I were visiting the Paris HQ of Alan, the digital health insurance platform in which Index was an early investor. Alan’s CEO and co-founder, Jean-Charles Samuelian-Werve, mentioned that he was incubating an open-source AI startup called Mistral a couple of floors below. After meeting his co-founder Arthur Mensch, we knew we had to be part of the journey.

Index invests in people as much as we invest in companies – which is why, after cutting that first seed check for Mistral, we’re thrilled to be continuing to support Arthur and the team in their latest funding round. At heart, Arthur is the kind of deeply technical engineer who could easily be building Mistral’s core models himself. Yet he’s shown himself to be talented at communicating Mistral’s bigger vision to customers, investors and policymakers. As a founder, it’s rare and incredibly powerful to be able to flip so fluidly between the close-up and the birds-eye view of your company.

That macro perspective is crucial as Mistral rides – and drives – a transformational wave in how businesses use AI. It’s no longer an experimental, ‘nice-to-have’ technology that employees are using ad-hoc; instead, we’re moving towards a world in which every major company will need to have a customized intelligence at its core. ASML’s decision to strategically partner with Mistral is a reflection of this. Mistral has shown impressive execution in building custom decentralized frontier AI solutions to solve the most complex engineering and industrial problems. More than simply selling cutting-edge models and LLMs, Mistral is en route to becoming the implementation partner of choice for enterprise – a one-stop shop for organizations putting AI to work at scale.

Mistral is the unquestioned AI leader being built out of Europe. Yet what excites us most is that it’s still early days. The enterprise AI market is just beginning to take shape, and Mistral’s success sets it up to be one of the big winners over the long term. We’re delighted to support them as they build the crucial AI infrastructure of tomorrow.

THE DETAILS

Mistral AI raises €1.7bn to accelerate technological progress with AI

Mistral announced a Series C funding round of €1.7bn at a €11.7bn post-money valuation. This investment fuels the company’s scientific research to keep pushing the frontier of AI to tackle the most critical and sophisticated technological challenges faced by strategic industries.

The Series C funding round is led by leading semiconductor equipment manufacturer, ASML Holding NV (ASML).

“ASML is proud to enter a strategic partnership with Mistral AI, and to be lead investor in this funding round. The collaboration between Mistral AI and ASML aims to generate clear benefits for ASML customers through innovative products and solutions enabled by AI, and will offer potential for joint research to address future opportunities.” said ASML CEO Christophe Fouquet.

For the last two years, Mistral has advanced AI through cutting-edge research and strategic partnerships with corporate and industrial champions. They will continue to develop custom decentralized frontier AI solutions that solve the most complex engineering and industrial problems. It powers enterprises, public sectors, and industries through state-of-the-art models, tailored solutions, and high-performance compute infrastructure.

“This investment brings together two technology leaders operating in the same value chain. We have the ambition to help ASML and its numerous partners solve current and future engineering challenges through AI, and ultimately to advance the full semiconductor and AI value chain”, said Mistral AI CEO Arthur Mensch.

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SurveyMonkey launches new AI Analysis Suite and design tools, unlocking clear insights and beautiful surveys without the complicated process

Stg Partners

SurveyMonkey today announced its latest SurveyMonkey AI innovations, including a new AI Analysis Suite and supercharged survey creation tools. The new features are designed to help users ask better questions, make smarter decisions, and move faster.

“SurveyMonkey has always been in the business of capturing real human sentiment and turning it into action,” said Meera Vaidyanathan, Chief Product Officer at SurveyMonkey. “AI now lets us do this faster and smarter—automating the legwork, surfacing insights that were previously hidden, and helping our customers act with greater confidence. With 25 years of history and more than 100 billion questions answered, we’re uniquely positioned to deliver trusted AI that makes feedback not just easier to gather, but far more powerful.”

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The Missing Emotional Layer in AI: Our Investment in Nuance Labs

Lightspeed

Nuance Labs Co-Founders Fangchang Ma and Edward Zhang

We’ve all experienced the uncanny valley: the slight discomfort when watching an AI avatar speak, the sense that something fundamental is missing despite impressive technical capabilities. Today’s AI can reason brilliantly and generate human-like text, but when it comes to emotional intelligence, AI remains surprisingly tone-deaf.

That’s where Nuance Labs comes in. We at Lightspeed are excited to invest in their seed round alongside Accel as they build what we believe will become a foundational layer for emotional intelligence in AI.

As IQ becomes commoditized through increasingly capable language models, emotional quotient (EQ) emerges as the critical differentiator. Yet we believe current AI systems fundamentally miss this dimension. AI avatars feel robotic, not because of pixel quality, but because they lack the subtle emotional expressiveness that makes human faces compelling, and they are far from real-time responsiveness.

Nuance’s breakthrough insight mirrors that of large language models: just as LLMs learned to understand meaning by predicting the next word, AI can understand emotions by learning to predict human emotions and behavior.

Nuance Labs is building a unified foundation model for real-time generation and understanding of realistic human expression across multiple simultaneous modalities, including text, speech, and video. This unlocks new categories of AI interaction:

  • Real-time emotional generation: Lifelike avatars that don’t just speak words but convey appropriate emotional responses through coordinated facial expressions, vocal inflection, and body language. Imagine AI therapists that pause thoughtfully, offer encouraging expressions, and adapt their demeanor to your emotional state, all in real-time.
  • Real-time emotion understanding: AI systems that can read subtle emotional cues as they happen, enabling applications like live coaching systems that detect when you’re losing confidence during a presentation, or interview AI that understands not just what candidates say but how they say it.

The team brings exceptional depth: Fangchang Ma and Edward Zhang previously built research teams at Apple, contributing to products like Vision Pro’s Digital Persona system. Their combined expertise in computer graphics, robotics, and machine learning, along with thousands of academic citations, strongly positions them to solve this technically complex challenge.

We’re entering an era where AI interactions will be measured not just by accuracy or speed, but by emotional authenticity. Any interface where humans interact with AI, from customer service and education to entertainment and healthcare, will benefit from emotional intelligence. We believe Nuance Labs is building the infrastructure that will power this next generation of AI experiences.

The uncanny valley stands as a barrier to natural human-AI interaction. Nuance Labs is building a bridge that will enable an entire ecosystem of emotionally intelligent AI applications. We’re thrilled to support their mission to make AI interactions as natural and emotionally rich as human conversation itself.

Excited to bring emotional intelligence to artificial intelligence? Nuance is hiring.

 

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Authors

Nnamdi Iregbulem

Nnamdi Iregbulem

Guru Chahal

Guru Chahal

Categories: News

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