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- Hot Off the AI Furnace Newsletter - February 4, 2025
Hot Off the AI Furnace Newsletter - February 4, 2025
Unveiling the new AI Hot 100 Conference, Jobs in AI, Upcoming Events & more
Angela & Hamza from The AI Furnace
February 04, 2025
Announcing The AI Hot 100 Conference 2025
Hey y’all, we’re back with The AI Hot 100 Conference this year on June 26th, 2025 in Manhattan, New York. We are going even bigger with a North America Edition that will take startup applications from across the US, and we are bringing in senior executives from Fortune 500 companies to meet founders building the breakthroughs of tomorrow!
The AI Hot 100 Conference 2024 put us on the map as the only curated index tracking early stage AI startups who are shipping industry-defining solutions. We hand picked top AI startups from the East Coast and connected them to industry, government and the investor community.
One of the key takeaways from the 2024 conference was that the most impactful connections were made between the Hot 100 startups and the industry leaders who could become their customers. This is the next evolution of the The AI Hot 100 concept.
The deepest AI innovation is happening at the startup level - we are seeing this everyday. But these breakthroughs are generally not being connected to the right industry use cases and problems. Executives have the decision making power, but are not close to the innovation from founders and are not seeing this breakthrough technology live.
Following feedback from various top founders about what they needed the most, we are making this a forum with curated executives and startups to reduce the gulf between startup innovation and industry. Especially in such a crucial year as 2025 for applied AI.
Expect to see top C-levels from major companies - CIOs, CTOs, VPs, Chief AI Officers - with the same strong curation around the Hot 100 startups that we are famous for. Also joining will be investors and policymakers. The brightest minds and change makers in one room.
Applications for executives and startups are open. For anyone else, we will be opening more applications later so keep an eye out. More to come on the community ticket application.
The AI Hot 100 List & Report 2025 - Now Accepting Applications
The AI Furnace is curating a list of the hottest 100 AI startups from across the US and bringing them to the one and only AI Hot 100 Conference in NYC on June 26th.
We have pre-seed to series B companies who are tier-1 VC backed and/or showing strong revenues on our list. We are now opening it up for more applicants.
Are you creating the next big AI company or know of anyone who is? Apply today!
Criteria 🎯
Showing strong traction, whether via revenue, customer reviews, investor backing or industry recognition. If you’re under the radar then even better!
Benefits 🎥
Curated connections with senior executives, investors and policymakers.
Inbound interest from the Hot 100 Report: Your brand will be added to our Hot 100 Report released to the attendees of the event and to our social following of 20,000+ people made up of AI founders, developers, investors, operators and researchers. Great for attracting customers and talent as well as investors.
Potential to demo at the conference and to win investment from a panel of investors via the Best of the Hot 100 Showdown (some of the Hot 100 will be picked to demo at the conference but this is not guaranteed).
How We Do It 📝
Startups are evaluated by a committee of AI experts, technologists, industry vertical experts to help select the Hot 100.
Whether you're from the East Coast or West Coast - if you think you have what it takes then go ahead and apply.
OpenAI Launches Deep Research - A Move towards High Latency, High Accuracy Agentic Applications?
Continuing on last week’s theme around the inadequacies around retrieval augmented generation (RAG), OpenAI’s launch of Deep Research may be bringing in a new paradigm. An era where AI will be used to complete very complex tasks that will take hours to complete but result in very high economic value, with reduced hallucinations and increased accuracy.
In our predictions post a few weeks ago, I had written about inference time reasoning as a way for Agents to increase the complexity of the tasks they can carry out by taking more time to reason, albeit with a higher cost per token. Deep Research employs this high latency approach, and points towards a future where “high value” workflows are completed by AI despite the higher costs.
Let’s take the example of replacing juniors on a private equity due diligence for an acquisition. You’d pay a legal team in the tens of thousands of $$ at least to do this type of review work, going through hundreds or thousands of docs on the target company to ensure there are no legal or commercial issues. If LLMs can do this with high latency to achieve stronger reasoning and higher accuracy, there is likely to still be a cost saving even if AI compute costs are much higher than usual.
So the real question will be, is your use case worth it?
Yours truly,
Hamza Zaveri & Angela Mascarenas
Any questions or feedback on this section? Reach out to us hamza@aifurnace.co
📈 Venture Deals To Watch Out For
Adclear, a London based AI reg-tech company, raised €603K in its Pre-Seed funding.* (link)
Abstract, a regulatory superintelligence platform, raised $4.8 million in its Seed funding. (link)
Coram AI, a cloud-based video security company, raised $13.8 million in its Series A funding. (link)
Vividly, an AI-powered trade promotion management company, raised $18 million in its Series A funding. (link)
Fazeshift, an AI agent for accounts receivable, raised $4 million in its Seed funding. (link)
Sereact, an AI-powered robotics solution company, raised €25 million in its Series A funding. (link)
BforeAI, a predictive cyber defense AI platform, raised $10 million in its Series B funding. (link)
Mercor, an AI-powered hiring platform, raised $75 million in its Series B funding. (link)
* Adclear are demo’ing at our London Demo Day event on 4th February. Stay tuned!
⚙️ New Tools & Product Launches You Won’t Want to Miss
Kimi - upgraded its multi-modal large language model trained with reinforcement learning. (Kimi K1.5)
Shortwave v3 - an AI email assistant that can reason about how to organize your inbox. (Shortwave)
Captions AI - Simplify video editing with AI-powered captions. (Captions AI)
Google Health AI - open its Health AI Developer Foundation models (HAI-DEF). (Google Health AI)
Psyche - Nous Research released its open AI training infrastructure on Solana. (Psyche)
Hugging Face - adds serverless inference providers, simplifying deployment of models like DeepSeek R1 and Llama. (Hugging Face)
Moveworks - an AI-powered platform for workplace automation and productivity. (Moveworks)
🎞️ Highlights from The AI Hot 100 Conference: AI as a Force for Good Panel
Hear from Sophia Mahfooz (Founder & CEO, Back Humanity, GlobalVisas) talk about how AI can be used for the good of humanity, moderated by Angela Mascarenas (Co-Founder, The AI Furnace) at The AI Hot 100 Conference in NYC, September 2024.
Top Jobs in AI
Join a high growth funded startup, having <100 employees, which are actively HIRING.
Patrol (Pre-seed, VC-backed, $1M+ Raised) - AI Compliance for Shopify Merchants
Full Stack Software Engineer (Link) - Boston based
Mytra ($50M Series B) - Manufacturing supply chain automation and intelligence
Sana Labs ($55M Series B) - AI driven enterprise learning tools
Seekr ($74M Series B) - Highly secure enterprise AI platform
Kalshi ($30M Series A) - Prediction Market platform turning any event into a financial position
Looking to hire in AI? Drop us an email to get featured on our Job Board at hamza@aifurnace.co.
Check Out The AI Hot 100 Market Map
The AI Furnace put together the AI Hot 100 Report and Market Map (East Coast Edition) in September 2024. We curated this list of startups (pre seed to series A) from thousands of applications based on signals such as team, founder-market fit, revenue, customers, partners, investors and more. To see full report, refer 2 friends to the newsletter, using the link below 👇
AI Hot 100 Market Map (East Coast Edition)
Upcoming Events 📆
Sponsored by:
Furnace Growth
Thank you to Furnace Growth for sponsoring today’s newsletter. Furnace Growth is a full-service Marketing & Business Development Agency specialized in making Technical AI Companies stand out, communicate and scale their products to the right target market in a competitive AI landscape. We help AI startups get to the next level by educating the market via brand building, social media content, digital and product marketing, and in-person events to become THE name in the niche and generate strong leads. Building in the AI space takes a unique mindset to growth, and this is where we come in as a creative partner to the world’s most ambitious AI companies.
📢 Interested in sponsoring? Reach out to us at angela@aifurnace.co to get your brand in front of thousands of AI entrepreneurs, researchers, investors, executives, and AI leaders.
About The AI Furnace
The AI Furnace is a global network of 15,000+ AI founders, developers and researchers. It was started by Angela Mascarenas and Hamza Zaveri, AI founders from NYC and London who started the org to support fellow AI founders and operators building in local cities outside of Cerebral Valley (San Francisco).