AI Hot 100 Podcast: Demo Walkthrough of Small Language Models Powering Agentic AI | Brian Benedict, Co-Founder & CRO | Arcee AI (raised $28M)

The next instalment of the AI Hot 100 Podcast sees Hamza Zaveri interview Arcee AI co-founder, Brian Benedict, where we also walk through a demo of the Arcee platform. Brian previously worked at Hugging Face and this is where he saw the potential of small language models (SLMs) to solve a lot of problems for the adoption of AI in enterprise. He then took the leap with his co-founders to launch Arcee, the platform enabling organizations to create SLMs on their own domain specific data.

This conversation delves into the difference of powering AI agents with small models vs large models, how he got his first customer, the effectiveness of RAG and more.

Arcee AI is part of the AI Hot 100 List 2025, and Brian will be joining at the AI Hot 100 Conference on June 26th, 2025.

Featured Tool: Pangram Labs* - Stanford Grads Whose AI Text Detection Tool has Broken Records and Assumptions

The common knowledge is that AI text detection doesn’t work. But these two Stanford grads and AI/ML research founders paved their way to a tech breakthrough and proved everyone wrong.

Max Spero and Bradley Emi became friends in their dorm at Stanford before embarking on careers as AI researchers at Google and Tesla respectively. Whilst they were excited at the potential of AI to change society, they wanted to do their part to mitigate the inevitable harms caused by AI—namely, AI plagiarism and unwanted AI content polluting human spaces. They left their careers and, spurred by the technical challenge, set out to create the most accurate AI detector startup in the market, Pangram Labs. Their focus is on upholding academic integrity as teachers adapt to managing students and classrooms in an AI first world, but are also catering to Journalism, Legal and HR use cases.

Before delving further, here’s the backstory. When Angela and I were working on Vokel (shelved given lack of market demand - story for another newsletter), we were building deepfake detection tools to identify AI generated voices to protect against fraud. The Pangram team had reached out to us end of 2023 as they were adjacently working on text detection. We grabbed Korean food in Brooklyn and have been in touch since.

The team has been heads down breaking technical barrier after barrier. Pangram is the only model that can achieve greater than 97% accuracy on detecting AI generated text from all the latest language models (Deepseek, ChatGPT, GPT-4, LLaMA, Bard, Claude, Mistral, and many more). This is compared to 76% with Turnitin and 72% with GPTZero, their closest competitors. On top of that, their false positive rate is a whopping 1 in 10,000 meaning their tool is only wrong once in 10,000 runs - much more effective than other detection models.

Here’s the technical report expanding on how they reached this level of performance. A key differentiator being their active learning methodolgy, whereby an AI agent searches for shortcomings in the detection model and learns and fixes itself over time. Angela and I developed classifiers in our own startup and know how hard it is to achieve such high levels of accuracy, so we knew there was something special about the team.

Pangram Labs has made their technology classroom ready for K12 and colleges as a plagiarism solution via a plugin for teachers. They also have dashboard and API solutions for other use cases. The classifier is robust to humanizer technology, cowritten text, minor changes, and artificially added typos.

Watch how it works with uploading docs or even just by highlighting stuff whilst scrolling on the internet. Give it a try here.

_{*we’re investors.}

Upload docs to check whether they’re AI or not:

Highlight any text on the internet and check if it’s AI or not via the Chrome extension:

Yours truly,

Hamza Zaveri & Angela Mascarenas

Any questions or feedback on this section? Reach out to us [email protected]

📈 Venture Deals To Watch Out For

• Pinkfish AI, a generative automation company, raised $7.6 million in its Pre-Seed funding. (link)

• VISARUN AI, an UAE-based AI visa platform, raised $700k in its Pre-Seed funding. (link)

• Prior Labs, a Germany-based AI company that analyse tabular data, raises €9 million in its Pre-Seed funding. (link)

• Future AGI, an AI infrastructure and lifecycle management company, raised $1.6 million in its Pre-Seed funding. (link)

• Human.org, an AI safety lab solving AI Alignment, raised $7.5 million in its Pre-Seed funding. (link)

• Model ML, a AI platform for investment banking and PE workflows, raised $12 million in its Seed funding. (link)

• Perspective AI, a customer data analytics company, raised $4 million in its Seed funding. (link)

• StackAdapt, an AI-powered programmatic advertising platform, raised $235 million in its venture round. (link)

• Warmly, an autonomous AI sales orchestration company, raised $6 million in its Series A+ funding. (link)

• fal, an AI media creation infrastructure platform, raised $49 million in its Series B funding. (link)

• SpotDraft, an AI-powered legal platform for contract management, raised $54 million in its Series B funding. (link)

• Sardine AI, an AI-powered fraud detection platform, raised $70 million in its Series C funding. (link)

• Harvey AI, a legal AI copilot, raised $300 million in its Series D funding. (link)

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

• Pangram Labs, the leading AI text detector on the market. (Pangram Detector)

• Grok3, fresh from xAI, apparently the best LLM yet? (Grok3)

• Le Chat by Mistral AI, a French LLM seeking to take the spotlight from DeepSeek. (Le Chat)

• Readdy AI, an AI-powered product design platform turning texts into UI. (Readdy AI)

• Yapz, an online form builder that transforms traditional forms into engaging, conversational experiences. (Yapz)

• AnythingLLM, a self-hosted AI chatbot building platform on Github. (AnythingLLM)

• Hugging Face releases first open-source robotics foundation models. (Hugging Face)

• Incogni, an automated personal data removal tool to protect privacy. (Incogni)

• Nowadays, an AI-powered corporate event planner. (Nowadays)

• Seomatic.ai, an AI-powered SEO tool automating keyword research, content optimization, and competitive analysis (Seomatic.ai)

• Tabnine, an AI coding assistant for real-time code completions. (Tabnine)

🎞️ Highlights from The AI Hot 100 Conference: Making NYC the Next Unicorn Factory

Hear from Julie Samuels (CEO, Tech:NYC), Cecilia Kushner (Chief Strategy Officer of NYCEDC), Jesse Middleton (General Partner, Flybridge Capital) and moderated by Angela Mascarenas (Co-Founder, The AI Furnace) 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.

Pinkfish ($7.6M Pre-seed) - GenAI automation platform for enterprises

• Automation Specialist (Link)

• Principal Backend SWE (Link)

• Sales Developement (Link)

C the Signs ($8M Series B) - AI driven platform for early stage cancer prediction

• AI Research Scientist (Link)

• Product Owner (Link)

• Tech Lead (Link)

Prior Labs ($9.4M Pre seed) - Specialized foundational models for data science and business intelligence use-cases

• Founding Data Scientist (Link)

• ML Engineer (Link)

• Research Scientist (Link)

• Data Science DevRel (Link)

GetWhy ($34.5M Series A) - Video interviewing and market research AI agents

• Principal Insights Consultant (Link)

• Head of RevOps (Link)

DevAI ($6M Seed) - Agentic AI solutions for enterprise IT infrastructure management

• Founding Software Engineer (Link)

• Founding Applied AI Engineer (Link)

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

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