Jos White’s Post

Cogna Secures £3.76M Funding to Revolutionize AI-Driven Software Solutions Cogna secures £3.76M led by Hoxton Ventures to democratize AI-driven custom software solutions for businesses. Founded by Ben Peters and Lars Mennen, Cogna's SaaS platform enables seamless data integration across domains, empowering users to create bespoke software tools with AI assistance. The investment will fuel expansion and product development efforts, emphasizing user-centric innovation. With notable investors like Stan Boland and Hermann Hauser, Cogna aims to revolutionize business optimization through AI-driven solutions, fostering a new era of data-driven decision-making and problem-solving tailored to individual business needs. #Cogna #AI #SoftwareSolutions #Funding #HoxtonVentures #BenPeters #LarsMennen #SaaS #DataIntegration #ProductDevelopment #Innovation #BusinessOptimization #DataDriven #DecisionMaking #ProblemSolving #BespokeSoftware #CustomSolutions

UK-based venture capital firm AlbionVC DOES believe that Europe can spawn global vertical software leaders. According to them, "the next sectors to be served by industry specific software are precisely those which play to Europe’s industrial heritage", namely hard industrial verticals such as construction, logistics, utilities and manufacturing. "AI and sustainability are the powerful catalysts these sectors need." Good news for Maince! And ... cheers to the author for listing us in their selection of European AI-enabled construction tech! Read AlbionVC's article here: https://lnkd.in/eezfjP_E #construction #infrastructure #ai #datadriven

🔺 Can Europe win in vertical software?   Europe is fragmented, and its ecosystem is relatively immature. US on the other hand is a huge single market thus there is no hope for European vertical SaaS. Yet Cat McDonald, investor AlbionVC doesn’t see it this way. The push towards a more sustainable economy and a boom in generative AI are driving a new wave of innovation across Europe’s legacy industries. Low NPS scores and stale incumbents are being challenged by a new generation of startups across industrial industries from manufacturing to utilities and construction. Read more here: https://lnkd.in/eezfjP_E.   If you’re building with this vision or know someone is, we would love to hear more about it.   #tech #manufacturing #construction #ai #sustainability #perspectives #VC #venturecapital #software #logistics #utility

SaaS Daily Funding News $270m+ invested into the software industry. Details 👇 Hume AI - Series B - $50m - The AI toolkit to measure, understand, and improve how technology affects human emotion. Fieldguide - Series B - $30m - an AI-powered engagement platform for Assurance and Advisory firms. Activeloop - Series A - $11m - structures the unstructured data to seamlessly connect your computer vision data to machine learning models. Cargofive - Seed Round - $2.6m - empowers freight forwarders by providing solutions to digitize their rate procurement, rate management, and quotation processes. Bedrock Security - Seed Round - $10m - Frictionless Data Security Scaleup Finance - Seed Round - $8m - provides a financial management platform designed to improve the management and administration of financial operations. OpenPipe - Seed Round - $6.7m - an AI platform that enables software developers to build datasets and fine-tune prompts with a more affordable model. Picogrid - Seed Round - $12m - builds a unified platform for autonomous systems. BINARLY🔬 - Seed Round - $10.5m - the most advanced automated AI/ML supply chain security platform to identify vulnerabilities in firmware and software components Glui - Seed Round - $1.87m - an integrated adtech platform that offers interactive advertisements on social media post or website banner. JobPixel - Seed Round - $4.7m - allows enterprises to collect, curate, edit, and publish short-form video content from audiences. iCustoms.ai - Seed Round - $2.2m - One customs platform for every business. Revolutionising legacy customs software market. Ensis AI - Seed Round - $4m - develops AI-powered proposal software for government RFPs and RFIs, streamlining processes and creating proposals. ValidMind - Seed Round - $8.1m - an AI Governance and Risk Management solution provider focused on the Financial Services industry. Observe, Inc. - Series B - $115m - offers an observability cloud solution to accelerate the transformation of troubleshooting applications and resolving incidents. #saas #software #startups #venturecapital #technology #startup

The incorrigible Charles Hudson, someone whom I have had the privilege to work with in his previous role at Uncork Capital as an investor and board member at a company I led, writes a post about how AI application start-up innovation will have to play nicely with established software vendors. "While we have invested in AI-powered applications and will continue to do so, I remain cautious about how much of the economic opportunity is available to early-stage startups. The big, incumbent tech companies have been early, active participants in this ecosystem. It feels that much of the surplus value created by AI-powered software will flow to the software buyers, not the firms producing that software.” Having worked at a startup and at established software providers and currently consulting a few, I've seen this from both sides. My initial thought was that this time around, established providers have a tremendous moat in the form of data, domain expertise, and reputation/trust to buy time to innovate on AI-powered capabilities. And by that, potentially shut out a lot of stand-alone AI upstarts and keep the spoils to themselves. This was my thinking about 8 months ago. But it has evolved. Given the ridonkulous pace of innovation and maturity of AI constructs, it's just not going to be feasible for established companies to innovate on everything and fast enough. By not feasible, I mean that budgeting cycles, reporting cycles, development cycles, recruiting cycles, the chutzpah to pivot - they are just not set up or skilled up to move fast enough even if the will is there. And contrast that with the sheer pace of innovation. Take Sora from OpenAIs latest innovation. It's been barely a year since the release of the GPT-powered text interface and now we are building cinematic quality 1 min video clips based on a simple prompt in English. I can think of a dozen enterprise use cases for this capability. So I have more and more conviction we will see is less of a "winner builds all" by established organizations but rather, a race to see which established system of record software provider can ruthlessly prioritize what they will build internally whilst constructing the best, easiest-to-integrate ecosystem of single purpose start-up partnerships that together, will truly supercharge a given business process. There will be exceptions or at least I hope but no joy so far. I've seen 3 next-gen System of Record upstarts recently but, sadly, nothing compelling to forklift out an incumbent. Most are looking to use AI to un-inspiringly evolve decades-old processes vs actually rethinking the process with AI as the nucleus of the design construct. Like every innovation spurt, it's going to get messy and way overblown, before it gets clean. But unlike Cloud platforms and ecosystems that came after SaaS applications, this time around, the ecosystem around a given established system of record application provider will be the precursor. Buckle up.

I had the pleasure of participating in Brown Advisory's NOW Forum in San Francisco this week, where Elise Liberto and Marc Andreessen from Andreessen Horowitz discussed 'Optimism and Aspiration: Investing in Innovation' A key theme was how #NativeAI companies and products will differ from the traditional software solutions we know today. TAKEAWAY #1:   Marc highlighted how companies built around large codebases, like Salesforce, are becoming obsolete. 📉 This supports my belief that as the barrier to building products lowers, the market will be flooded with new products competing for limited budget and mindshare. 💡 This will fundamentally shift how all companies go to market. (#NicheKnowledgeSelling) TAKEAWAY #2: Marc addressed a question I often ask the startups I advise: Why won't large software juggernauts just develop their own AI capabilities, to render new #startup solutions redundant and unnecessary? 🤔 To answer, Marc strapped on his baking hat and used a cake analogy, explaining that existing software giants can only add AI as "frosting" to their already baked cake. 🎂 In contrast, AI-native companies are able to mix AI "sugar" directly into their base, creating inherently smarter solutions. 🌟 For example, traditional software like Salesforce relies on from hours of manual data entry from company employees, whereas modern AI products automatically access details from all internal and external communications to answer questions like: - Which reps will hit quota this quarter? 📈 - How can we win the deal with customer X? 🏆 - What are the top pain points we can address for Persona Y? 🔍 I’m seeing these capabilities unfold in real time with companies like Adept AI and Lerno, and I'm excited about the benefits. 🚀 Why do you believe native AI startups will out-compete tech giants to achieve #hectocorn status of their own? 💭

Another great report (as usual) by ChartMogul: “The New Normal For SaaS”: • “Acquiring new business is challenging” ⇒ The graphs illustrating the decline in growth for most SaaS companies are particularly brutal. We’ve shifted from a time when the median SaaS company grew its ARR by more than 70% year over year to less than 30%. • At the same time, “Achieving a 100%+ NRR is becoming more difficult across all ARR segments” ⇒ This means that businesses are not only purchasing less software, but they are also reducing usage of their existing stack. It’s a double whammy for SaaS founders: harder to attract new customers and more challenging to upsell existing ones. Beyond the pure numbers, here are a couple of personal comments related to early-stage founders: • The path to reaching $1M in ARR is becoming longer and more difficult. Not only is it harder to grow a SaaS business, but securing VC funding at that stage is also increasingly difficult. • Given this context, if you’re starting a SaaS in 2024, imo a crucial aspect is to choose a market or segment of customers that is still in the equipment phase. This means targeting prospects who are not already equipped with competitor software that you need to replace. Replacing existing software is incredibly challenging right now and can kill any momentum. • I also believe that it’s one of the factors that explains why some early-stage AI startups are experiencing rapid growth—they are often the first AI assistant software for many businesses. They do not need to replace an existing product. As usual with tough environments, this situation will potentially clean the space. So there's the chance that we see strong survivors emerge when the global environment improves (if it does one day 😅).

Historically, service businesses have not been considered venture-backable. Compared to software businesses, services performed by humans tend to have a low margin, are hard to scale, and are lumpy in revenue. But AI is cracking open substantial new opportunities. Service businesses that leverage both humans and AI to deliver solutions will start to outpace legacy service providers. Here are some thoughts on how you can build one of these companies.  https://lnkd.in/eiRFkBU9

Caught this article thanks to Scott Brinker. Insightful lens into the concept of "service-as-software" thanks to the rise of GenAI. I can definitely see how this is becoming a thing, especially through leveraging industry specific AI solutions to provide serious efficiency gains. I ran my real estate agent's contract through just general ChatGPT just to identify how standard or not their contract was. It caught a component about commissions that was outside the norm. I could imagine with the right utilization of these AI solutions you could run circles around the legacy service competition on the market. From the article: "We’ve already started to see how AI is impacting the delivery of services: Law firms are now using vertical generative AI applications like Spellbook and Casetext for more efficient contract review, due diligence, and legal research. Accounting firms are leveraging companies such as Materia for faster and more efficient delivery of their services by augmenting accountants with tools that automate tasks. Solopreneurs are using Collective (an Ardent portco) for AI-powered bookkeepers and accountants instead of using tools like Quickbooks, reducing the time and cost it takes to manage their books. Outsourced software development firms are currently using co-pilots and will soon be able to use platforms like Opendevin and Codeium for autonomous software development, bug detection, and testing to lower their COGS." ----- https://lnkd.in/g3FJEtVe

Jump Raises $4.6M to Enhance AI Software for Financial Advisors - Funding Secured: Jump, a provider of AI software for financial advisors, raised $4.6 million led by Sorenson Capital with participation from Pelion Venture Partners. - Operational Expansion: The funds will be used to expand operations and development efforts. - Automated Solutions: Jump’s AI automates tasks like notetaking, data sifting, follow-up emails, task lists, and CRM data syncing. Subscribe to our daily newsletter here for more AI news https://lnkd.in/d5NSxXqZ #AI #Fintech #Investing #Entrepreneurship #VentureCapital #Business #Startups #Innovation #Technology #BigData