This is our tenth annual landscape and “state of the union” of the data, analytics, machine learning and AI ecosystem. In 10+ years covering the space, things have never been as exciting and promising as they are today.  All trends and subtrends we described over the years are coalescing: data has been digitized, in massive ..read more

Billing infrastructure has been a vexing issue for generations of software and Internet companies.  It is mission critical infrastructure and as such, feels like a problem that should have been sold a long time ago. Yet ask any company and you’ll generally get the same reply: they’re dissatisfied with their billing system, which doesn’t offer the ..read more

1) Be an AI leader: Buy at least one share of Open AI in that employee secondary at an $86B valuation – then change website and all social profiles to “early believer and investor in Open AI” 2) Leverage the network: In conversation, drop frequent references to “Sam”, “Satya” and “the Besties” – I put ..read more

Is this it? Are we back? Everyone in the startup and venture world has been waiting for months for the re-opening of the IPO window. After a record breaking 2021 (1035 IPOs, beating the previous record of 480 in the year 2020), 2022 saw a dramatic decline (181 IPOs) and 2023 so far has not ..read more

(This post is part of my “This Week in AI” series, which is general off-the-cuff market commentary. I’m not an investor in either MosaicML or Databricks) $21M per employee. That’s the price Databricks is paying for MosaicML — a total of $1.3B for 62 employees (in Databricks stock, and also includes employee retention packages). One ..read more

Synthesia, the market leader in AI video generation, is announcing this morning an exciting $90M Series C financing. This is a great milestone for the company, making it a newly-minted unicorn and adding strong new partners (Accel, Nvidia, and some great individuals) to the team. Beyond the fundraising momentum and accolades, however, Synthesia has first ..read more

Pigment just closed an exciting $88M Series C (TechCrunch coverage here). The company is rapidly emerging as the global leader in the next generation of business planning platforms (aka Anaplan replacement), a testament to the power of a world-class team delivering great execution consistently over years. While we at FirstMark are certainly excited to have ..read more

Note: those are quick thoughts on some of last week’s most interesting news in AI. I may, or may not (!) do this on a regular basis. This last week in AI: Adobe killed all the Generative AI design startups with Firefly, and then Microsoft killed all the other Generative AI startups with its plugins ..read more

I recently got an opportunity to chat with Prateek Joshi on Infinite Machine Learning, his excellent podcast. It was a wide-ranging conversation about Generative AI (which I would recommend listening at 1.25x speed or more, makes me a lot more articulate). We covered a range of topics including:  Links to the episode: ? Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/chatgpt-plugins-generative-ai-in-the-enterprise-matt/id1615142314?i=1000611323550 ..read more

Every year, as part of our MAD project, we do a presentation at Data Driven NYC about the top trends we see across data and ML/AI. (here’s the 2022 version for reference). The presentation, done this year with my FirstMark colleague Kevin Zhang, is a whirlwind tour of top trends, as opposed to anything particularly ..read more