What you need to know:

• Funding for AI agents has skyrocketed since 2022, driven by market leaders like Harvey and Luminance. 

• Differentiation will be important to watch — whether through added features, integration strategy, or core product. 

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The post The legal AI market is ripe for M&A — here’s who could get scooped up next appeared first on CB Insights Research.

Outside of costly content licensing deals, model developers and enterprises are turning to synthetic data — artificially generated datasets such as text and images — to supplement AI model training, especially in domains where data availability is limited or privacy is a concern. 

Since 2022, nearly 30 of 50 vendors identified in the synthetic training data space have raised equity funding. But overall funding has stalled as big tech eyes opportunities in the space — and as generative AI itself has upended the business models of data simulation companies founded prior to LLMs mainstream arrival. 

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The post Synthetic data funding has stalled as big tech moves in — we analyzed 50 companies to identify green shoots in the space appeared first on CB Insights Research.

Nvidia has used its experience developing graphics processing units (GPUs) — which were originally developed for applications like gaming but turned out to be rather good at AI tasks — to become a dominant force in AI infrastructure and applications. 

But a host of established companies and startups are investing heavily to capture a share of the growing AI computing market. This includes building new types of chips specifically for training and running AI models, evolving traditional processors like CPUs and GPUs to better support AI workloads, and exploring novel information processing technologies such as quantum and neuromorphic computing. 

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The post The AI computing hardware market map appeared first on CB Insights Research.

What you need to know: 

• The AI agent space remains nascent overall, but a growing cohort of startups has begun selling a product — suggesting the sector is poised for accelerated commercial growth in the months ahead.
• Investors like Y Combinator, OpenAI Startup Fund, and a16z are actively backing AI agent startups, with YC alone investing in 10+ companies in this space.

The future of the workforce is deeply entwined with AI — and enterprise AI agent startups, mostly early-stage, are rushing to seize the opportunity.

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The post Enterprise AI agents are on the cusp of broad commercialization appeared first on CB Insights Research.

In August 2024, we surveyed 50 corporate strategy leaders (at the Director-level or above) working at companies across major industries to identify key challenges they face in driving influence across their organizations and the approaches they use to address them.

Only 40% have clearly defined KPIs to measure their success and alignment issues appeared as the top pain point for strategic planning.

Download the full report to delve into the most common pain points faced by strategy teams, the tactics used by the most influential teams to improve strategic planning, and what challenges still remain unaddressed.

The post Here’s how successful strategy teams drive influence across their organizations appeared first on CB Insights Research.

What you need to know: 

• The OpenAI co-founder’s AI safety startup has raised $1B, reflecting the industry divide on AI risks — and the rush to back the next tech giant. 
• SSI’s deal marks the 9th $1B+ AI equity round of the year, following record levels of AI investment in Q2’24.

OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever’s AI startup Safe Superintelligence (SSI) recently announced it had raised $1B at a $5B valuation. 

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The post Monster VC deals: $1B+ AI rounds keep coming as investors hedge their bets on who the next tech giant will be appeared first on CB Insights Research.

Essential resources to understand the future of energy & climate tech:

• State of Climate Tech Q2’24 Report — Here’s where climate tech funding is going and where we’re seeing pockets of interest.

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The post Our top energy & climate tech research and trends to watch appeared first on CB Insights Research.

The question is certainly top of mind for corporations getting to grips with emerging technology like generative AI — the answer could help identify future competitors, partners, new markets, or acquisition targets.  

Using CB Insights’ proprietary data and metrics — including Exit Probability, Commercial Maturity, Mosaic, headcount, patents, and funding — we identified the 52 emerging players our data says are most likely to have an outsized influence in the next 5–10 years and have a strong exit. 

Download the report to see:

• The full list of Future Tech Hotshots
• Key themes and industry analysis
• Methodology

MORE TOP COMPANY LISTS FROM CB INSIGHTS:

• Insurtech 50: The most promising insurtech startups of 2024
• AI 100: The most promising artificial intelligence startups of 2024
• The Digital Health 50: The most promising digital health companies of 2023
• Fintech 100: The most promising fintech startups of 2023

The post Future Tech Hotshots: 52 emerging tech startups that will have big, successful exits appeared first on CB Insights Research.

What you need to know:

• Companies like Joby Aviation, Archer Aviation, Lilium, and Volocopter are nearing eVTOL commercialization, with plans to launch air taxi services as soon as 2025, pending regulatory approvals.

• Regulatory hurdles, infrastructure requirements, and battery efficiency are key challenges that need to be addressed before eVTOLs can become a widespread mode of transportation.

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The post Small electric aircraft are edging closer to swarming the skies — here’s what to expect as the ‘flying car’ tech matures appeared first on CB Insights Research.

What you need to know:

• Multi-agent systems outperform single agents on complex tasks by leveraging specialized sub-agents, improving accuracy and modularity.
• While still in the early stages, multi-agent architectures are gaining traction in enterprise applications like customer service and software development, with major tech companies and startups developing frameworks and tools.
• Future software applications will be defined by their agent architectures. We envision that AI agent marketplaces will emerge, enabling dynamic integration and collaboration between specialized agents across platforms.

AI agents — LLM-based bots that can independently assign themselves to and complete tasks to fulfill a user’s goal — took off like wildfire in 2023.

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The post The Multi-Agent AI Outlook: Here’s what you need to know about the next major development in genAI appeared first on CB Insights Research.

Unlike big tech peers like Google and Meta, it’s largely kept its in-house model development activity out of the public eye. With a focus on the on-device user experience — and smaller models as a result — Apple is relying on external large language models (LLMs) from partners like OpenAI to round out its generative AI suite.

Using CB Insights data, we uncovered the 3 biggest strategic priorities in Apple’s AI strategy:

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The post Analyzing Apple’s AI strategy: Small models, spatial computing, and consumer-friendly AI agents appeared first on CB Insights Research.

In the US, checks and cash have already declined from representing half of all B2B payments in 2019 to a projection of less than a third (32%) in 2024, according to eMarketer. In emerging markets, paper’s share of B2B transactions is likely higher, but coming down thanks to the rise of digital commerce and digital operating systems for merchants.

Companies offering B2B payments solutions are digitizing and automating formerly manual processes like creating invoices, processing payments, and analyzing payments data. Many are building platforms that consolidate the steps in the B2B payments value chain in one place, enabling faster and more transparent payments and financing between businesses. 

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The post The B2B payments tech market map appeared first on CB Insights Research.

In 2024 so far, a16z has backed more than 20 AI startups working within disruptive categories. For example, this year, it has invested in several AI-driven copilots and agents designed to automate key workflows in big industries like healthcare and finance. It has also turned its attention to multimedia generation startups expediting the creation of a wide variety of content, from images to videos to audio.

While championing AI’s advancement, the firm also acknowledges associated risks — its founders are proponents of open-source models, arguing that their transparency and accessibility will help ensure that AI is developed in a secure and ethical way. So far this year, the two largest a16z-backed AI deals have gone to open-source large language model (LLM) developers xAI and Mistral AI.

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The post Analyzing a16z’s AI investment strategy: Where the firm sees opportunity amid the genAI rush appeared first on CB Insights Research.

What you need to know:

• GenAI M&A activity continued to pick up in H1’24, featuring notable deals like Snowflake’s acquisition of TruEra and Nvidia’s acquisitions of Run:ai and Deci — putting the spotlight on the companies that may be next.
• High-momentum genAI startups with leading M&A Probability are in markets including machine learning security and agents & copilots.

More companies are looking to gain an AI edge by acquiring a startup — overall AI M&A activity spiked in Q2’24 to 119 deals, surpassing even the heady 2021 levels.

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The post GenAI M&A is heating up. Here are the 20+ startups that could be acquired next appeared first on CB Insights Research.

In addition to facing regulatory pressure – a US judge recently ruled that Google was illegally maintaining a monopoly – the online search giant is being pushed to lean into AI to defend its position, rolling out AI Overviews to users in the US in May. 

Meanwhile, OpenAI has started testing out its own AI search tool called SearchGPT, while a new crop of genAI-powered startups are using the tech to power the next generation of search engines. 

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The post Can Perplexity threaten Google? appeared first on CB Insights Research.

As new, hard-to-predict threats emerge from the nascent genAI space, so too do startups working on a broad range of novel cybersecurity solutions — some of which protect against genAI risks, while others use genAI to build new defenses. 

But among these young companies, which are building the tech solutions that could eventually grow into their own cybersecurity markets? 

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The post Generative AI is upending old cybersecurity assumptions — here are the emerging themes and players to watch appeared first on CB Insights Research.

With the rapid development of generative AI, consultancies are keen to use the tech to streamline internal processes and launch AI-based products for their enterprise clients. 

Boston Consulting Group, for example, is zeroing in on responsible AI through its partnership with large language model developer Anthropic. Meanwhile, Deloitte’s AI Institute launched an internal generative AI copilot in January 2024 to streamline tasks like coding and project planning, with plans to offer the tool to 100K employees. 

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The post AI strategies for 8 of the world’s biggest consultancies: Where Accenture, Deloitte, and 6 other giants are making moves appeared first on CB Insights Research.

To stay on top, OpenAI has raised billions of dollars in funding and ramped up its hiring into the thousands of employees.

It has also acquired 3 startups in the last year to add new enterprise tech capabilities and talent, as noted in the Acquisition Insights on OpenAI’s CB Insights profile. 

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The post OpenAI is on an M&A tear — here’s who it could acquire next appeared first on CB Insights Research.

For the networking leader, AI forms the crux of a multi-pronged strategy to steer away from pure hardware toward services and software, which offer expanded revenue streams. Cisco is investing in pure-play AI infrastructure startups, forming AI partnerships, and embedding AI in its products.

Yet Cisco is going one step further by embracing an approach to AI computing centered on Ethernet and networking fabrics. These technologies could help handle the scale the speed demanded by data- and compute-intensive AI workloads. To this end, Cisco has partnered with chip leaders like Nvidia to help businesses manage AI clusters and deployments more easily. 

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The post Analyzing Cisco’s growth strategy: How the networking giant is betting on emerging infrastructure in AI and cybersecurity appeared first on CB Insights Research.

Wiz also considered a $23B acquisition by Google, before walking away from the offer in July with plans to pursue an IPO. The news comes alongside rising cyber consolidation as cyber leaders look to keep up with an evolving attack surface, with M&A activity up 14% quarter-over-quarter (QoQ).

We break down the cybersecurity landscape in H1’24 across funding trends, mega-rounds, exits, and more using CB Insights data

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The post Cybersecurity in 6 charts: Wiz’s mega-round buoys funding in the first half of the year appeared first on CB Insights Research.

Amid the funding decline, investors are favoring smaller mid- and late-stage deals. However, they are still willing to place early-stage bets where they see strong opportunities.

Based on our deep dive in the full report, here is the TL;DR on the state of climate tech:

• • Global climate tech funding declines by 20% QoQ to $4.9B in Q2’24 — the lowest quarterly total since Q2’20. While deal count rebounded QoQ to 397 in Q2, it still came in well below 2023’s quarterly totals.

• • Climate tech doesn’t see any unicorn births (private companies reaching $1B+ valuations) in Q2’24, marking climate tech’s second straight quarter without any new unicorns. This coincides with a decline in late-stage deal sizes — the median deal size at that stage is $38M in 2024 YTD, down 16% vs. full-year 2023.

• • Late-stage deal sizes decline, while early-stage sizes show strength. The median late-stage deal size is $38M in 2024 YTD — down 16% from full-year 2023. In contrast, median early-stage size is up 39% YTD, suggesting that investors are still willing to place bets where they see strong early-stage opportunities. Two of the largest early-stage deals in Q2’24 went to Cylib and Aether Fuels. Both companies intend to use the funding to scale and support commercialization initiatives — goals that are generally communicated by later-stage companies.

• • $100M+ mega-rounds continue to trend down in Q2’24. Climate tech mega-rounds dropped from 17 in Q1’24 to 9 in Q2’24. The majority of Q2’24’s mega-round recipients are focused on scaling operations and achieving full-scale commercialization. For example, one of the quarter’s largest deals ($375M Series G) went to battery materials developer Sila, which plans to use the funding to ramp up silicon anode production.

Source: CB Insights — Sila Funding Insights

• Climate tech funding drops yet again in Asia. Climate tech startups in the region raised a total of $0.4B in Q2’24, down 33% QoQ and 89% YoY. China suffered the sharpest funding decline (-90% QoQ) among highlighted countries in the region. India and Japan watched funding fall by 28% and 57% QoQ, respectively.

More energy resources from CB insights

• 5 climate tech markets gaining momentum in 2024
• The grid tech market map: The companies tackling the growing need for reliable electricity
• The energy impact of generative AI: 3 technologies transforming the future of data centers
• Analyzing 15 oil & gas leaders’ tech priorities: Here’s where incumbents are buying, investing, and partnering
• Sodium-ion batteries are poised for a breakout moment — energy players should prepare
• Why energy giants should have green ammonia on their radar

The post State of Climate Tech Q2’24 Report appeared first on CB Insights Research.

The logistics giant is ceding its USPS contract — worth ~$2B per year — to its competitor UPS in September 2024. But despite the upcoming loss in revenue, FedEx’s recent earnings have exceeded expectations and it has actually seen its share price reach an all-time high since USPS announced it wouldn’t renew. 

As FedEx cut costs and reconfigures its shipping network to focus less on expensive-to-maintain air cargo (which USPS relied upon heavily), it now has more wiggle room to ramp up its investments in areas that promise a long-term pay-off.

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The post FedEx lost a deal worth $2B in ARR to archrival UPS — here are 3 strategic moves it’s doubling down on in response appeared first on CB Insights Research.