Nordic AI Weekly: Scaleout Systems, MVision AI, re:nable, 1X, Humani, Viezo, Avanto Care, and all the latest news & resources
Recent funding, news, and resources for builders
Quick reads on value creation
Things to know, whether you are building 🛠 or investing 💰
🤓 Bill Gates with an insightful piece on the beginning of the age of AI, and how it can be used for good.
🤓 Sarah Guo on how every company needs an AI strategy - provides a great background to the LLM disruption, value creation, and the key questions in entering this new era.
🎙 OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on Lex Fridman podcast discussing GPT-4, ChatGPT, and the future of AI.
📖 A new study co-authored by OpenAI researchers has taken “an early look at the labour market impact potential of LLMs”, finding that 80% of the US workforce could see at least 10% of their tasks affected by GPT, and 19% of American workers might have at least 50% of their jobs exposed to AI.
Again considering labour market implications - how AI is eating software - making software production more accessible, cheaper, and less complex.
🔮 From MIT, ChatGPT is about to revolutionise the economy and we need to decide what that looks like.
📺 Understanding AI moats using Silicon Valley (the show).
Recent AI funding in the Nordics & Baltics
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🇸🇪 re:nable: Platform combining retailers’ content, user and expert reviews, purchase intent data, and AI, in order to optimise performance marketing and content creation. Raised $2.88m from angels (link).
🇸🇪 Scaleout Systems: Federated learning platform enabling you to leverage siloed, business sensitive and regulated data in your machine learning pipelines. Raised $680k from Grinden Ventures, Uppsala University Holding, Beijer Ventures AB, Almi Invest, and angels (link).
🇸🇪 Avanto Care: Collecting and analysing data on the health, activity and environment of the elderly in order to help care providers to prevent care injuries, improve diagnoses, adjust interventions and free up resources. Raised $1.05m from angels.
🇳🇴 1X: Engineering and robotics company producing androids capable of human-like movements and behaviours. Raised $23.5m from OpenAI Startup Fund, Tiger Global Management, Alliance Venture, Skagerak Maturo, and Sandwater (link).
🇩🇰 Humani: Personal development platform helping individuals and organisations to unlock their full potential. Raised $2.17m from Dreamcraft Ventures (link).
🇫🇮 MVision AI: Streamlining the radiotherapy treatment planning workflow with an AI-powered automatic segmentation tool helping to standardise contouring and automate segmentation. Raised $5.4m from J12 Ventures, and Voima Ventures (link).
🇱🇹 Viezo: Vibration energy harvesting technology by which sensors and other IoT elements can be powered without batteries. Raised an undisclosed amount from Rockstart, Koinvesticinis Fondas, and angels (link).
Latest AI news & best reads in the Nordics & Baltics
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🤔 Daniel Langkilde, CEO and co-founder of Kognic, on the probability of near-term AGI-like systems, and how his views on the subject have changed in recent times.
🛒 The Swedish cybersecurity company Baffin Bay Networks, which provides predictive threat protection, was acquired by MasterCard for an undisclosed amount.
🇸🇪 Swedish news publisher DiDigital with a new series on AI and how Swedish companies can become winners.
🛍 Klarna launched a shopping-focused integration with ChatGPT, allowing users to ask questions and have conversations about prices, products, recommendations and comparisons.
📝 Stockholm-based Hypertype launched on ProductHunt with its solution for writing emails 10x faster using AI and your email history.
🪑 IKEA is using 100 autonomous drones to count stock in its warehouses during nonoperational hours.
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 🌍 🌎 🌏
🆕 OpenAI announced ChatGPT Plugins, connecting ChatGPT to the internet and enabling early use cases from companies including Expedia, Klarna, Shopify, Slack, and Zapier. More from TechCrunch here.
🎨 Adobe launched a beta version of Firefly - its own generative AI for creatives - enabling users to create and edit new content using everyday language.
🆕 NVIDIA is going beyond being a pure hardware provider to become an enterprise-first AI provider, as they announced NVIDIA AI Foundations - helping clients to build custom multimodal LLMs and generative models for their varying and fine-tuned use cases.
In a keynote at NVIDIA’s GTC Conference, CEO Jensen Huang shared how they will bring AI to every industry, stating that “we are at the iPhone moment of AI”.
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