Nordic AI Weekly: Nortical, Carcare, Maintract, SustainLab, Bintel, SIQ Basketball, Exolyt, and all the latest news and resources
Recent funding, news, and resources for builders
Quick reads on value creation
Things to know, whether you are building 🛠 or investing 💰
💰 Why AI Foundation Model companies are raising on such high valuations (TL;DR: high capital intensity upfront, and the potential for outsized growth in the long-run), and why one should look at other AI companies (e.g. applications and tools) with a different lens.
🤨 An FT piece on investor scepticism towards high AI valuations and how to make money in the space.
📺 Tune in to see CEO Satya Nadella outline Microsoft’s vision for the reinvention of productivity and the future of work with AI, in a livestreamed event on 16th March (it will air a bit late in Europe, so maybe catch the highlights after).
👩🏫 TechCrunch piece on the best way to start an AI project within an organisation - “don’t think about the models”.
💡 It’s all feeling a little bit 2009, but indeed “there’s an AI for that” - sizeable library of AI tools for hundreds of different tasks.
Recent AI funding in the Nordics & Baltics
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🇸🇪 Nortical: Combining AI-powered data analytics with battery expertise to provide a tailored understanding of battery performance and degradation. Raised $370.5k.
🇸🇪 Carcare: Automated process tool that monitors and increases the turnover rate of your car inventory. Raised an undisclosed amount from Ampli Ventures.
🇸🇪 Maintract: Contract generation and process automation to put contracts on autopilot. Raised $610k from Wellstreet and angels (link).
🇸🇪 SustainLab: Sustainability Management platform that automates the collection, processing and visualisation of sustainability data. Raised $330k from angels (link).
🇸🇪 Bintel: Enabling data-driven waste management that is automated and optimised. Raised $1.31m from EIT Digital and Almi Invest (link).
🇫🇮 SIQ Basketball: 9D sensor, AI, and app providing real-time shot tracking and shooting analytics. Raised $3m from KB Partners and Tera Ventures (link).
🇫🇮 Exolyt: AI-powered platform that interprets TikTok user behaviour and performance analytics to give businesses a foresight into the brand’s growth potential. Raised $476k from Founder’s Edge and Trado Capital (link).
Latest AI news & best reads in the Nordics & Baltics
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🛍 Tomas Montvilas, CCO of Lithuanian company Oxylabs, on how e-commerce companies can harness web scraping, AI and ML to enhance their business.
🇱🇻 Cool things being built in Latvia:
BirgerMind is developing a brainwave measuring device and software that can convert brain activity into text, enabling paralysed people to communicate.
Giving robots sensitive skin - scientists from the Institute of Solid State Physics of the University of Latvia (ISSP UL) have partnered with international researchers to help robots see and feel the surrounding environment without using, for example, video systems.
If there is some relevant Nordic AI news or funding that is missing from this newsletter, feel free to share by replying directly or emailing nordicaiweekly@substack.com and I’ll look to spread the word next week. Thanks!
News from the wider world 🌍 🌎 🌏
🆕 It’s highly likely that the existing large platforms - with their vast amounts of data and huge existing customer bases to distribute to - will be amongst the biggest winners if they integrate AI effectively into their software. We’re now seeing some significant platform upgrades powered by OpenAI…
Microsoft introduced the next rollout of AI product updates across its business apps portfolio, with an AI-powered copilot within ERP, CRM, and workflow tools.
Hubspot introduced new AI tools integrated in the platform, in the form of a content assistant enabling AI content generation, and ChatSpot - a conversational CRM bot for sales and marketing professionals to increase productivity.
Salesforce announced Einstein GPT, which it claims to be the world’s first generative AI CRM technology - delivering AI-created content across every sales, service, marketing, commerce, and IT interaction, at hyperscale.
Salesforce is pretty serious about generative AI, also recently announcing a $250m fund to invest in the space.
Slack, owned by Salesforce, introduced the ChatGPT app for Slack - delivering instant conversation summaries, research tools, and writing assistance directly in Slack.
With all of the above powered by OpenAI, Google is seeking to compete by aiming to incorporate generative AI into all of its biggest products within the next few months.
📰 In other news…
🤓 These were the 100 most cited AI papers in 2022 - interestingly the top two spots are occupied by papers on protein structures, while the US and China are way ahead of the rest of the world.
🧠 Noam Chomsky on the false promise and limitations of LLMs.
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