Venture capital continues to flow to startups developing artificial intelligence and generative AI technology. Here’s a look at 10 companies that successfully raised new funding in May.
Follow The Money
The venture capital space continues to show signs of exiting the slump it has been in since early 2022. But while startups in such technology areas as data analytics and next-generation networking are attracting investors, a great deal of VC money is going into startups developing products that in some way involve or incorporate artificial intelligence and generative AI technology.
Case in point is CoreWeave, the AI data center and infrastructure provider that tops the May Follow the Money roundup with an impressive $1.1 billion in Series C funding. Also making the list is AI “data foundry” company Scale AI at No. 2 with a $1-billion Series F funding round.
In a reminder that data is the lifeblood of AI systems, this month’s funding list includes a number of companies, including WekaIO and Atlan, that develop data management systems and technology that play a critical role in AI operations. The roundup also includes startups Sigma and Hydrolix that develop next-generation big data analytics software.
Also achieving a nine-figure funding round was Alkira, which develops on-demand network infrastructure technology that integrates diverse environments into one secure network fabric.
Here’s a look at 10 companies that raised funding in May 2024.
CoreWeave
Headquarters: Roseland, N.J.
CEO: Mike Intrator
Funding: $1.1 billion in Series C funding. (Later in May CoreWeave announced a definitive agreement for a $7.5 billion debt financing facility led by Blackstone with strategic participation from Magnetar and Coatue.)
Investors: The round was led by Coatue with participation from Magnetar, Altimeter Capital, Fidelity Management & Research Company, and Lykos Global Management.
What company does: CoreWeave is an AI hyperscaler, providing data centers and IT infrastructure for AI, machine learning, graphics and rendering, real-time streaming, and other high-performance computing tasks.
CEO Quote: “CoreWeave continues to push forward as a provider of critical infrastructure in the development of AI, and the high caliber of investors who continue putting their trust in us validates the enormous opportunity we have to define the next generation of cloud computing. CoreWeave is designed specifically to tackle the most complex and pressing challenges in high performance compute. With this new round, we will continue investing in and working with the largest AI enterprises in the world.”
Scale AI
Headquarters: San Francisco
CEO: Alexandr Wang
Funding: A $1 billion Series F funding round that pushed the company’s valuation to $13.8 billion.
Investors: The round was led by existing investor Accel with participation from returning investors Y Combinator, Nat Friedman, Index Ventures, Founders Fund, Coatue, Thrive Capital, Spark Capital, Nvidia, Tiger Global Management, Greenoaks and Wellington Management. New investors included Cisco Investments, DFJ Growth, Intel Capital, ServiceNow Ventures, AMD Ventures, WCM, Amazon, Elad Gil and Meta.
What company does: Scale AI describes itself as “the data foundry for AI” with its data labeling technology for managing and annotating data for training AI and machine learning systems.
CEO Quote: “Data abundance is not the default; it’s a choice. It requires bringing together the best minds in engineering, operations, and AI. Our vision is one of data abundance, where we have the means of production to continue scaling frontier LLMs many more orders of magnitude. We should not be data-constrained in getting to GPT-10.”
Sigma
Headquarters: San Francisco
CEO: Mike Palmer
Funding: $200 million in Series D funding.
Investors: The round was co-led by Spark Capital and Avenir Growth Capital with additional investments from new investor NewView Capital and all previous investors including Snowflake Ventures, Sutter Hill Ventures, D1 Ventures, Xn Ventures and Altimeter Capital.
What company does: Sigma is developing a suite of cloud-based, collaborative data analytics system with a spreadsheet interface that can perform data analysis tasks on billions of records.
CEO Quote: “Sigma is proving that there is deep market demand for driving greater productivity and monetization as a result of the cloud data transition. Just as infrastructure has consolidated on just a few cloud providers, and cloud data with even fewer application providers, Sigma is the winner in the application space, enabling everyone, from the least to the most technical employees, to gain new value from their cloud investment. With the product enhancements we’re rolling out related to AI, Python and data applications, Sigma is defining the next category of data platforms and, as a result, also driving industry leading growth and adoption from the Fortune 10 to the latest startup.”
WekaIO
Headquarters: Campbell, Calif.
CEO: Liran Zvibel
Funding: The oversubscribed Series E funding round raised $140 million and boosted WekaIO’s valuation to $1.6 billion. The company said the round consisted of a combined primary and secondary transaction.
Investors: Valor Equity Partners, a previous investor in WekaIO, led the round. Other existing investors that participated in the round and increased their positions in the company included General Investment Management, Nvidia, Atreides Management, 10D, Hitachi Ventures, Ibex Ventures, Key1 Capital, Lumir Ventures, MoreTech Ventures and Qualcomm Ventures.
What company does: WekaIo develops an AI-native data management platform.
CEO Quote: “The continued backing of this preeminent group of investors speaks volumes: WEKA is building something truly transformative that modern data-driven organizations need now, more than ever.”
Atlan
Headquarters: San Francisco
CEO: Prukalpa Sankar
Funding: Atlan raised $105 million in Series C funding, bringing its total funding to more than $206 million and raising its valuation to $750 million.
Investors: The round was led by GIC, Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund, along with co-investor Meritech Capital and participation by existing investors Salesforce Ventures and PeakXV Partners.
What company does: Atlan develops data control plane technology for data catalog and data governance tasks.
CEO Quote: “Over the past year, boards have consistently asked their CIOs and CDOs about their AI roadmaps, who have realized that the main hurdle isn’t AI models but the lack of AI-ready data—data enriched with business context, trust, and security. Atlan is addressing this by building the control plane for the data and AI stack, integrating trust and context into the digital fabric.”
Alkira
Headquarters: San Jose, Calif.
CEO: Amir Khan
Funding: A $100 million Series C funding round.
Investors: The round was led by global investment firm Tiger Global Management with additional investment from Dallas Venture Capital, Geodesic Capital, LIAN Group and NextEquity Partners; and participation from existing investors including Kleiner Perkins, Koch Disruptive Technologies and Sequoia Capital.
What company does: Alkira develops on-demand network infrastructure technology that integrates diverse environments into one secure network fabric.
CEO Quote: “The explosive growth of cloud applications and AI workloads are fueling a surge in demand for agile, secure, scalable cost-efficient networking solutions. We’re fortunate to have strong partners to help us meet that demand while we accelerate growth, explore exciting new opportunities, and continue delivering exceptional value to our customers. Our talented team is the engine behind Alkira’s success, and we’re deeply grateful for their hard work and dedication in getting us to this point.”
TXOne Networks
Headquarters: Irving, Texas , and Taipei, Taiwan
CEO: Terence Liu
Funding: The Series B extension round raised $51 million.
Investors: The round was led by TGVest Capital with participation by previous investors Pegatron Group, CDIB Capital Group and CDIB-Innolux II L.P. and new investors Taiwania Capital and Applied Ventures ITIC Innovation Fund L.P.(a joint fund of Applied Ventures LLC and Industrial Technology Investment Corp. – Taiwan).
What company does: TXOne develops cybersecurity systems that protect industrial control system and operational technology environments from cyberattacks.
CEO Quote: “The successful procurement of $51 million in this extension round marks a significant achievement for the company and underscores the confidence and trust of our investors in TXOne Networks’ vision and potential.”
Hydrolix
Headquarters: Portland, Ore.
CEO: Marty Kagan
Funding: The $35 million raised in the Series B funding round raised the company’s total funding to $68 million.
Investors: The round was led by S3 Ventures with participation from previous investors including Nava Ventures, Wing Ventures, AV8 Ventures and Oregon Venture Fund.
What company does: Hydrolix develops a cloud-based streaming data lake system for storing, managing and analyzing huge volumes of log data.
CEO Quote: “Hydrolix is disrupting the market in an era where companies have come to view their data as a vital asset they can no longer afford to discard because of cost. Whether they need deeper real-time insights or are building AI-enabled applications, companies need immediate access to all of their data without sinking the ship with exorbitant data storage costs. We have achieved the product-market fit that all start-ups aspire to and have entered a high-growth phase that will fuel product development, our sales engine and a forthcoming partner program that will be a bedrock for expansion.”
Forward
Headquarters: Austin, Texas
CEO: Brandon Lloyd
Funding: $16 million in a seed funding round.
Investors: The round was led by Commerce Ventures, Elefund and Fiserv.
What company does: Forward develops technology that helps SaaS application companies integrate and monetize payments.
CEO Quote: “Most software companies get the technical part right but fail to achieve their business goals. We believe many software companies who have ‘integrated payments’ should be generating greater revenue from these products, and Forward is here to help them do that.”
Recall.ai
Headquarters: San Francisco
CEO: David Gu
Funding: The $10 million Series A round brought the company’s total funding to more than $12 million.
Investors: The funding round was led by Ridge Ventures with participation from Industry Ventures, Y Combinator, IrregEx, Bungalow Capital, Hack VC and other existing investors.
What company does: Recall has developed a universal API and other infrastructure for online meeting bots, allowing businesses to access data from virtual meeting systems like Zoom, Google Meet and Microsoft Teams.
CEO Quote: “Remote work has increased the number of video conferences in the world by orders of magnitude. Simultaneously, LLMs have made it easy to extract structured data from conversations, like key objections from a sales call, patient symptoms from a telehealth session, or completed tasks from a daily standup.
Today, millions of hours of meetings happen every day over video conferencing platforms and hundreds of AI companies try to make sense of them using AI-powered meeting bots. The problem is that these bots take teams of specialist engineers months to build.”
