AI Hot 100 Podcast: Democratizing Data Structuring & Insights in an AI World | Kirk McKeown, Co-founder & CEO | Carbon Arc (raised $40M+)

Super excited to launch our first episode of the AI Hot 100 Podcast with Hamza Zaveri and Angela Mascarenas interviewing Carbon Arc CEO, Kirk McKeown. Kirk is a legend in the finance space - he was Head of Proprietary Research at top hedge funds such as Point72 and Glenview Capital before leaving to launch Carbon Arc, a platform enabling all companies to get a data edge on par with the methods used by hedge funds.

This conversation delves into Kirk’s background and how it informed his decision to start Carbon Arc, how he got his first customer, Deepseek, what the future of AI holds and more.

Carbon Arc is part of the AI Hot 100 List for 2025, and Kirk will be joining the AI Hot 100 Conference on June 26th, 2025.

📈 Venture Deals To Watch Out For

• Manas AI, an AI-powered drug discovery platform, raised $24.6 million in its Seed funding. (link)

• Krutrim, an LLM company for Indian languages, Ola founder Bhavish Aggarwal, raised $230 million in a round of funding. (link)

• Camouflet, an AI embedded dynamic pricing platform, raised $12 million in its Series A funding. (link)

• Hamming AI, a company specializing in automated testing and analytics for AI voice agents, raised $3.8 million in its Seed funding. (link)

• Mitiga, a SaaS and cloud threat detection, investigation, and response solution provider, raised $30 million in its Series B funding. (link)

• UVeye, an AI-driven vehicle inspection company, raised $191 million in a round of funding. (link)

• Palona AI, a D2C AI agent company, raised $10 million in its Seed funding. (link)

• Rad AI, a healthcare startup specializing in AI-powered tools for radiologists, raised $60 million in its Series C funding. (link)

• &AI, a legal tech startup focused on AI agents for patent work, raised $6.5 million seed funding. (link)

• Comstruct, a platform streamlining construction procurement workflows, raised $13 million in funding. (link)

⚙️ New Tools & Product Launches You Won’t Want to Miss

• BooSum - an AI-powered book and document summarization tool. (BooSum)

• ByteDance - released Monolith, its recommendation system on Github. (Monolith)

• Real-Time - developed by Fireflies AI, it can capture notes and action items in a call for you. (Real-Time by Fireflies AI)

• Rox - an AI-powered sales platform that unifies business data and generates smart customer insights and proactive engagement. (Rox)

• AssemblyAI - a real-time AI powered speech-to-text API. (AssemblyAI)

• Missio - an AI copilot for product management, automating workflows and optimizing decisions. (Missio)

🎞️ Highlights from The AI Hot 100 Conference: Anthropic CodeGen Demo: Building an App in 15 mins

Hear from Alexander Bricken (Applied AI, Anthropic) about Building an App in 15mins using Anthropic CodeGen (from The AI Hot 100 Conference in NYC, September 2024).

Top Jobs in AI

Join a high growth funded ($5M+) startup, having <100 employees, which are actively HIRING.

Air ($35M Series B) - Ops automation for creatives / marketers

• Product Lead (Link)

• AI Engineer (Link)

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• Platform Engineer (Link)

MagicSchool AI ($45M Series B) - AI-driven learning platform for schools

• GenAI Engineer (Link)

• Cloud Architect (Link)

• Head of Product (Link)

BaseTwo AI ($11.5M Series A) - AI Co-Pilot for Manufacturing

• Product Manager (Link)

• Product Designer (Link)

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VIAVIA ($8M Seed) - AI-powered product lifecycle management for fashion retailers

• Director of Merchandise and Strategy (Link)

• Sr. Product Designer (Link)

• Logistics Manager (Link)

Coram AI ($13.8M Series A) - Intelligence software for security cameras

• Sr. Backend Engineer (Link)

• Sr. C++ Engineer (Link)

• Sr. Technical Recruiter (Link)

Looking to hire in AI? Drop us an email to get featured on our Job Board at [email protected]

Interesting Posts

Agentic Object Detection - Removing the Need for Labelled Data: Andrew Ng dives into how agents are removing the need for training an AI visual model with labelled data when it comes to object detection. For example, you can prompt an agent to identify unripe strawberries in a picture and it can do so without needing to be trained on data that is labelled on how ripe vs unripe strawberries look. This is possible because the agent can use reflection, tool use, planning, multi agent collaboration and more to generate a high quality output. It’s awesome to see the advancements we’re witnessing in LLMs and agents and applying them to imagery and object detection! See it here.

Edge LLMs: In a blog post titled "Advances to low-bit quantization enable LLMs on edge devices", researchers from Microsoft Research discuss how low-bit quantization can enable the deployment of large language models (LLMs) on edge devices by compressing models and reducing memory demands. Read the blog here.

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