A Note from Hamza & Angela to The AI Furnace Community Going into 2025

Hey y’all, what a year it’s been!!

2024 was an incredible journey building in the AI space with all of you—there’s truly nothing else we’d rather be doing! We’ve had the privilege of working alongside some of the most talented and driven people we’ve ever met. We tested ideas that didn’t always work, learned from them, and grew stronger. We’ve become the marketing arm for AI founders, so we were heads last year hosting our inaugural AI Hot 100 Conference and we’re planning an even bigger one in NYC this year!

Our mission remains simple yet ambitious: To empower AI founders and drive startup innovation as the world experiences massive transformation.

Here’s what we’re adding to this newsletter to bring even more value to you:

• Job Board
 • New Tools & Product Launches
 • Venture Deals
 • The AI Hot 100 Podcast (launching soon—read on for details!)
 • Exclusive Panel Content from our NYC AI Hot 100 Conference (Sep 2024)

Insights Heading into 2025

Through building The AI Furnace—a global network of AI founders, investors, execs and researchers—we’ve been incredibly fortunate to witness and develop a finger on the pulse of cutting-edge innovation firsthand. This unique vantage point allows us to spot trends and patterns across different layers and geographies of the AI ecosystem, which might not be immediately visible to those focused on just one area.

With that, here’s what excites us most for 2025:

1. Vertical-Specific AI/Small Language Models: AI thrives on domain-specific data, and we’re seeing greater success with AI products that are built with quality UX workflows embedded in areas of deep domain expertise - vertical specific AI.

   Related to this, there is increased attention on SLMs (small language models trained in a certain domain as opposed to large language models that are more generic). Open-source innovation is closing the gap with closed-source models, and SLMs are becoming more feasible to run on-device. This shift addresses privacy concerns by ensuring data stays secure and local, on top of getting to lower latency and cheaper costs. We see SLMs and edge AI becoming even more important not only in Enterprise but also in Physical Robotics, enabling physical robots to run AI more efficiently and securely with intelligence stored locally (similar to human minds).

2. AI-Driven Services Industry: AI driven services businesses—spanning software development, legal, HR, accounting, and more—are poised to take a larger share out of the labor market with AI as an enabler.

3. Advance of the AI Agents: AI agents are evolving rapidly, especially in computer-based tasks. Innovations like UI-based approaches (where AI takes and adapts screenshots, with Anthropic’s Computer Use being a prime example) unlock a whole new paradigm of automation and human-like task execution. Additionally, inference-time reasoning enhances accuracy and task execution by allowing LLMs to take more time for complex tasks, potentially tackling bigger challenges though at a higher cost per token. The implications on knowledge work will be immense.

4. The Application Layer Comes Into Focus: We believe 2025 will be the breakout year for the application layer. We’re excited to see which use cases will transition from proof of concepts to full-fledged, thriving products. Menlo estimated $4.6 billion spent on generative AI applications last year (up from $600 million in 2023), with sales and customer support AI leading the charge in 2024.

Finally, a huge congratulations to the startups in our community that crushed it in 2024—many of whom we met during their stealth phases. Companies like Wordware, Vsim, Athena Intelligence, Piramidal, Anterior, VoyceMe, Carbon Arc, Arcee, Maven AGI and Nexa AI to name a few achieved incredible milestones in fundraising and customer success.

We’re thrilled to continue building this community with you and look forward to bringing even more value through our newsletter, events, and initiatives in 2025.

Stay tuned! Yours truly,

Hamza & Angela ✌️

🎧 Podcast Launch Trailer: Sneak Peak of the AI Hot 100 Podcast

Droppin’ our trailer for the first episode of the AI Hot 100 Podcast, featuring Dylan Telano (CEO of VoyceMe, raised $10M+). Stay tuned to learn how VoyceMe is using AI to enhance anime/manga generation, signs of product-market fit, struggles in the early stages of building a startup, successes and what he learnt along the journey. Coming soon!

📈 Venture Deals To Watch Out For

• Vapi, a San Francisco-based AI-powered voice agents company, raised $20 million in its Series A funding. (link)

• Anatomy Financial, a provider of AI-driven financial automation solutions tailored for the U.S. healthcare sector, has secured $19 million in Series A funding. (link)

• Apheris, a federated computing company powering data networks for the life sciences sector, completed its Series A funding round, bringing total funding to date to $20.8 million. (link)

• Fraction AI, an AI-assisted data labeling platform, has secured $6 million in a pre-seed funding round. (link)

• Nevermined, a Zug, Switzerland-based provider of AI payment infrastructure for AI-to-AI transactions, has secured over $4 million in funding. (link)

• Precision Neuroscience, a brain-computer interface maker, has secured $102 million in its Series C funding. (link)

• Tenvie Therapeutics, a San Francisco-based biotechnology company specializing in the development of small-molecule therapies for neurological diseases, has secured $200 million in Series A funding. (link)

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

• Reweb – A visual builder using Next.js and Tailwind CSS to create UIs for marketing, SaaS, dashboards and e-commerce. (Reweb)

• Flick – An AI-driven platform that streamlines social media management with tools for strategy, content creation, scheduling, analytics, and hashtag optimization. (Flick)

• Fuel iX – Tools to enables enterprise-scale management of generative AI applications and tools within a secure, responsible, and accurate AI framework. (Fuel iX)

• Humantic AI – AI-driven tools for sales teams to understand buyer personalities, enabling personalized outreach and improving deal success rates. (Humantic AI)

• Romi – A cute conversational AI robot offering natural, personalized companionship through advanced deep learning and interactive features. (Romi)

🎞️ Highlights from The AI Hot 100 Conference: Trends Changing the Face of Language Models Panel

Hear from Santanu Bhattacharya (MIT Media Lab), Brian Benedict (Co-founder, Arcee AI) and Andriy Mulyar (Co-founder, Nomic AI) about Small Language Models: Trends Changing the Face of Language Models (from The AI Hot 100 Conference in NYC, September 2024).

Top Jobs in AI

Join a high growth funded ($10M+) startup, having <50 employees, which are actively HIRING.

Basis ($34m Series A): An AI platform designed for accountants, providing AI assistants to automate manual, time-consuming tasks

• Machine Learning & Agent Design (link)

• Technical Staff - Research (Link)

• Technical PM (Link)

• Founding Sales (Link)

• Data + Infra (Link) 

Wordware (YC S24) - a toolkit that enables anyone to build, iterate and deploy their AI stack easily

• DevRel Engineer (Link)

• Chief of Staff (Link)

• Founding Designer (Link)

• Head of Revenue (Link)

Spexi - Highly detailed Earth Imagery data captured by state of the art drones

• Blockchain Engineer (Link)

• Marketing Lead (Link)

• Enterprise Account Executive (Link)

Formance - Open-source platform for financial flow automation

• DevOps (Link)

• Founding CSM (Link)

• Founding Account Executive (Link)

• Sr. Software Engineer (Link)

Looking to hire in AI? Apply here to add your roles to our Job Board.

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