Connect with us

Published

on

AlphaSense CEO Jack Kokko

AlphaSense

Google’s hefty investment in artificial intelligence and the latest boom in generative AI doesn’t end with its homegrown products. Parent company Alphabet is also putting money to work in the startup world.

Alphabet’s late-stage venture capital arm, CapitalG, told CNBC that it just led a $100 million investment in corporate data firm AlphaSense, valuing the company at $1.8 billion. AlphaSense competes with companies like FactSet and Bloomberg in providing data on businesses that can help inform corporate and investment strategies.

The funding round, announced Tuesday, follows months of increased hype surrounding generative AI, particularly OpenAI’s ChatGPT and other text-generating tools that use large language models, or LLMs, to provide creative and sophisticated answers to user queries. In February, Google introduced a conversational technology called Bard, which will integrate with the company’s dominant search engine and other products.

AlphaSense CEO Jack Kokko said AlphaSense is working on a product feature that will automatically summarize financial documents for customers so they can more easily glean key points. Summarization has long been a challenging task for AI software, but has gotten significantly better with the help of LLMs.

Kokko founded AlphaSense in 2011. The latest financing is a flat round following a $225 million investment in June that was led by Goldman Sachs and Viking Global Investors. In that round, the valuation doubled from a 2021 financing that was led by the same investors.

Generative AI wasn’t a talking point in the prior two rounds because the term hadn’t yet jumped into the popular lexicon. In its press release last year, AlphaSense said its platform uses “proprietary search technology” powered by AI and natural language processing to “extract relevant insights from an extensive universe of public and private content.”

Since late 2021, tech funding has dried up alongside a plunge in public company valuations and a freezing of the IPO market. Generative AI has been the one bright spot this year, turning rather frothy in some corners. In March, a 2-year-old pre-revenue startup called Character.AI, which was founded by two former Google employees, raised $150 million at a $1 billion valuation, in a round led by Andreessen Horowitz.

AlphaSense is much further along, having already surpassed $100 million in annual recurring revenue in 2022. Kokko said the fresh capital will go toward hiring additional salespeople as the company prepares to go public when the economy stabilizes. He said the money will also help AlphaSense improve its technology, taking advantage of advances in generative AI.

James Luo, a CapitalG partner, said part of the appeal of AlphaSense using newer LLMs is that it can make the core product more appealing to customers outside of traditional financial services. Salespeople, for instance, could be drawn to using a product like AlphaSense if the interface was more intuitive.

“These are the people who are using Google Search to try to find every piece of information but they don’t have access to a lot of proprietary content,” Luo said of potential new users. “If you don’t work in that world, you need something that makes it a lot easier for you to understand that information.”

Still, modern-day LLMs suffer from a phenomenon that AI researchers call “hallucination,” referring to the tendency for the software to generate inaccurate responses.

Kokko said AlphaSense is working on techniques to ensure that its technology creates accurate summaries with footnotes to documents so that people know the sources of the information. He declined to identify the specific LLMs that AlphaSense plans to incorporate, but he said the company is testing nearly every major model that’s currently available. Tech companies including Alphabet and Meta as well as startups like OpenAI and Cohere have developed LLMs.

WATCH: Wall Street rides a ‘levitation rally’ into the end of the first quarter.

Wall Street rides a 'levitation rally' into the end of the first quarter

Continue Reading

Technology

Texas Instruments’ stock falls on weak forecast

Published

on

By

Texas Instruments' stock falls on weak forecast

The Texas Instruments headquarters in Dallas, Texas, on Jan. 21, 2024.

N. Johnson | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Texas Instruments reported second-quarter results on Tuesday that beat analysts’ expectations for revenue and earnings. But the stock fell in extended trading due to a third-quarter forecast that missed estimates.

Here’s how the chipmaker did versus LSEG consensus estimates:

  • Earnings per share: $1.41 vs. $1.35 expected
  • Revenue: $4.45 billion vs. $4.36 billion expected

Texas Instruments said it expects current-quarter earnings between $1.36 and $1.60 per share, while analysts were looking for $1.50 per share. The company forecast revenue of $4.45 billion to $4.8 billion, for a midpoint of $4.625 billion. Analysts were expecting revenue of $4.59 billion.

Revenue increased 16% in the second quarter from $3.82 billion in the same period a year earlier. Sales in the company’s analog chip business, its largest, rose 18% to $3.5 billion, surpassing the StreetAccount estimate of $3.39 billion for the segment.

Net income rose 15% to $1.3 billion, or $1.41 per share, from $1.13 billion, or $1.22 per share, a year ago.

Texas Instruments is a key supplier of legacy semiconductors for automotive and industrial uses.

As of Tuesday’s close, Texas Instruments shares were up 15% for the year on broader market optimism for chips. In June, the company said it would spend $60 billion to expand chipmaking factories in Texas and Utah, a move that was praised by the Trump administration in its push to bring more technology manufacturing to the U.S.

Don’t miss these insights from CNBC PRO

Impact of Nvidia's return to China

Continue Reading

Technology

Trump met with Amazon’s Jeff Bezos at the White House last week, sources say

Published

on

By

Trump met with Amazon's Jeff Bezos at the White House last week, sources say

Jeff Bezos, founder and executive chairman of Amazon, takes the stage during The New York Times’ annual DealBook Summit, at Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York City on Dec. 4, 2024.

Michael M. Santiago | Getty Images

President Donald Trump met with Amazon founder Jeff Bezos at the White House last week, CNBC has learned.

The meeting between Trump and Bezos, one of the world’s richest men, lasted for more than an hour, according to two people familiar with the matter who asked not to be named because the conversation was private.

Amazon declined to comment on the meeting. A spokesperson for Bezos didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

The nature and exact timing of the visit couldn’t be learned.

A Gulfstream G700 private jet linked to Bezos landed in Dulles, Virginia, outside Washington, on July 14 before taking off the next day, according to Jack Sweeney, a programmer who tracks flight data from jets owned by Elon Musk, Bill Gates and others.

Bezos, who also owns rocket company Blue Origin, has cozied up to Trump during his second term in the White House. Trump frequently hurled insults at Bezos during his first term, largely because of the Amazon founder’s ownership of The Washington Post.

Read more CNBC Amazon coverage

Bezos joined a swath of tech CEOs on stage at Trump’s inauguration in January after donating $1 million to his inaugural fund.

The Trump administration praised Bezos for his decision to revamp the Post’s editorial pages to focus on “personal liberties and free markets.”

In April, Trump said Bezos, who stepped down as Amazon’s CEO in 2021, was “terrific” and “a good guy” after the billionaire assured Trump that the e-commerce giant had no plans to display tariff-related surcharges on its website.

More recently, Bezos has reportedly sought to capitalize on the dramatic falling-out between Trump and Musk, who spent more than $250 million to help Trump win a second White House term and previously led the government-slashing initiative called the Department of Government Efficiency.

Bezos competes with Musk, who is the CEO of SpaceX, through Blue Origin and Project Kuiper, Amazon’s low-Earth orbit satellite internet venture.

After Trump and Musk’s relationship soured, Bezos spoke with Trump on several occasions, while Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp traveled to the White House, The Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with the matter.

The conversations centered in part on government contracts, according to the Journal.

Continue Reading

Technology

Amazon to buy AI company Bee that makes wearable listening device

Published

on

By

Amazon to buy AI company Bee that makes wearable listening device

Amazon logo on a brick building exterior in San Francisco on Aug. 20, 2024.

Smith Collection | Gado | Archive Photos | Getty Images

Amazon plans to acquire wearables startup Bee AI, the company confirmed, in the latest example of tech giants doubling down on generative artificial intelligence.

Bee, based in San Francisco, makes a $49.99 wristband that appears similar to a Fitbit smartwatch. The device is equipped with AI and microphones that can listen to and analyze conversations to provide summaries, to-do lists and reminders for everyday tasks.

Bee CEO Maria de Lourdes Zollo announced in a LinkedIn post on Tuesday that the company will join Amazon.

“When we started Bee, we imagined a world where AI is truly personal, where your life is understood and enhanced by technology that learns with you,” Zollo wrote. “What began as a dream with an incredible team and community now finds a new home at Amazon.”

Amazon spokesperson Alexandra Miller confirmed the company’s plans to acquire Bee. The company declined to comment on the terms of the deal.

Read more CNBC tech news

Amazon has introduced a flurry of AI products, including its own set of Nova models, Trainium chips, a shopping chatbot and a marketplace for third-party models called Bedrock.

The company has also overhauled its Alexa voice assistant, released more than a decade ago, with AI capabilities as Amazon looks to chip away at the success of rivals such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude and Google’s Gemini.

Ring, the smart home security company owned by Amazon, has also looked to introduce generative AI in some of its products.

Amazon previously experimented in the wearables space through a health and fitness-focused product called Halo. It sunset the Halo in 2023 as part of a broader cost-cutting review.

Other tech companies have launched AI-infused consumer hardware with mixed success.

There’s the Rabbit R1, a small square gadget that costs $199 and uses an OpenAI model to answer questions, as well as the AI pin developed by Humane, which later sold to HP.

Meta‘s Ray-Ban smart glasses have grown in popularity since the first version was released in 2021.

OpenAI in May acquired Jony Ive‘s AI devices startup io for roughly $6.4 billion. The company reportedly plans to develop a screen-free device.

Don’t miss these insights from CNBC PRO

Top Amazon AWS executive on the outlook for generative AI

Continue Reading

Trending