Tags: General Catalyst

OpenAI announced it has acquired Hiro Finance, a fledgling AI‑driven personal finance startup founded by serial entrepreneur Ethan Bloch. The deal brings roughly ten Hiro employees into OpenAI as the startup prepares to shut down its service on April 20 and delete user data by May 13. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed. Backed by Ribbit Capital, General Catalyst and Restive, Hiro offered a verification‑enabled tool that modeled salary, debt and expense scenarios for consumers. The acquisition marks OpenAI's latest foray into financial‑services technology, though its exact plans for the talent remain unclear. Weiterlesen

Mirage, the company behind the video‑editing app Captions, has raised $75 million in growth financing from General Catalyst’s Customer Value Fund. The startup rebranded to Mirage, introduced a freemium model, and launched new AI models for pacing, framing, attention dynamics, and accent‑preserving audio. With more than 3.2 million downloads and over 200 million videos created, the platform serves an international audience and is targeting small‑business marketers. The fresh capital will fuel growth, especially in high‑growth Asian markets, and support the development of additional AI models for video assembly. Weiterlesen

AgentMail, a San Francisco‑based startup, announced a $6 million seed round led by General Catalyst with participation from Y Combinator and several angel investors. The company offers an API platform that gives AI agents dedicated email inboxes, supporting two‑way conversations, threading, labeling, searching and replying. Since its launch, AgentMail has attracted tens of thousands of human users, hundreds of thousands of AI agents, and more than 500 B2B customers. The service includes safeguards against abuse, such as sending limits and rate‑monitoring, and positions email as an identity layer for autonomous agents. Weiterlesen

Modal Labs, an AI inference infrastructure startup, is in early discussions with venture capital firms about a new financing round that could value the company at roughly $2.5 billion. If completed, the round would more than double the $1.1 billion valuation reported less than five months earlier. The company’s annualized revenue run rate is about $50 million. Co‑founder and CEO Erik Bernhardsson said the conversations are general and not an active fundraising effort. Existing backers include Lux Capital and Redpoint Ventures, while General Catalyst is reportedly considering leading the round. Weiterlesen

Chai Discovery, an AI‑driven biotech startup backed by OpenAI, announced a $130 million Series B financing round that lifts its valuation to $1.3 billion. The round was led by General Catalyst and Oak HC/FT, with participation from Menlo Ventures, OpenAI, Dimension, Thrive Capital, Neo, Yosemite venture fund, Lachy Groom, SV Angel, Glade Brook and Emerson Collective. The new capital brings the company’s total funding to over $225 million. Chai’s platform, now in its second generation (Chai 2), aims to accelerate drug discovery by using foundation models to design molecules and de‑novo antibodies, positioning the firm as a leading player in AI‑enabled biotech. Weiterlesen

Enterprise AI startup Serval announced a $47 million Series A round led by Redpoint Ventures, with participation from First Round, General Catalyst and Box Group. The funding backs Serval’s unique two‑agent architecture that uses deterministic, permission‑driven tools to automate IT service tasks while keeping human managers in control. Clients such as Perplexity, Mercor and Together AI are already using the platform. CEO Jake Stauch emphasized the focus on safety, explaining how the system avoids rogue actions by limiting agents to pre‑approved tools and granular approval workflows. Weiterlesen

Bilal Abu‑Ghazaleh, a former Scale AI executive, has founded 1001 AI to bring an AI‑native operating system to high‑stakes sectors such as aviation, logistics, construction and oil and gas in the Middle East and North Africa. The two‑month‑old startup raised a $9 million seed round led by CIV, General Catalyst and Lux Capital, with participation from a roster of global and regional angels. Abu‑Ghazaleh says the platform will cut inefficiencies worth more than $10 billion in the Gulf alone by automating decision‑making and orchestrating real‑time operations. Early deployments are slated for construction projects by the end of the year, with the company eyeing broader roll‑outs across the region’s megaprojects. Weiterlesen

Venture capital firms are targeting the $16 trillion services sector with a strategy that blends AI automation and roll‑up acquisitions. General Catalyst has earmarked $1.5 billion for a “creation” model that incubates AI‑native companies, then uses them to buy mature service firms and boost margins. Portfolio examples include Titan MSP, which received $74 million to develop AI tools and automate 38 percent of managed‑service tasks, and Eudia, a legal‑service platform that leverages AI for fixed‑fee contracts and has acquired Johnson Hanna. Other investors such as Mayfield and solo backer Elad Gil are backing similar approaches. A recent study warns of “workslop”—AI‑generated work that creates extra labor—potentially tempering margin gains, but proponents argue the model’s profitability and the need for specialized AI engineers make it a compelling new frontier for venture capital. Weiterlesen

French AI startup Mistral AI is finalizing a €2 billion investment that places the company at a post‑money valuation of $14 billion. The two‑year‑old OpenAI rival, founded by former DeepMind and Meta researchers, builds open‑source language models and the Le Chat chatbot for European users. While the firm declined to comment, the round marks its first major raise since a June 2024 financing that valued it at €5.8 billion. Mistral has previously secured over €1 billion from investors such as Andreessen Horowitz and General Catalyst, amid a surge in European AI funding. Weiterlesen

Orchard Robotics, the Cornell‑dropout‑turned‑Thiel fellow startup founded by Charlie Wu, announced a $22 million Series A round led by Quiet Capital and Shine Capital, with participation from General Catalyst and Contrary. The funding will accelerate the company’s camera‑and‑AI platform that delivers ultra‑high‑resolution fruit health data to growers of apples, grapes, and other specialty crops. Wu says the technology helps farmers make precise decisions on fertilization, pruning, and harvesting, addressing the industry’s reliance on limited manual sampling. Weiterlesen

Human Behavior, founded by 20‑year‑old Amogh Chaturvedi and his 22‑year‑old co‑founders Skyler Ji and Chirag Kawediya, has closed a $5 million seed round backed by General Catalyst, Paul Graham, Vercel Ventures and Y Combinator. The startup leverages vision AI to watch user session replays, automatically generating insights that replace manual event tracking used by tools like Mixpanel and PostHog. Its early customers—fast‑moving Series A and B startups—receive daily summary emails on feature usage, bugs and churn. The founders aim to become the “Datadog of session replay,” expanding the platform into multiple products. Weiterlesen

Anthropic, the AI startup behind Claude, announced a completed funding round of $13 billion that lifts its post‑money valuation to $183 billion. The company reported that its run‑word revenue surged from about $1 billion to more than $5 billion in less than nine months and that it now serves over 300,000 business customers. Large‑account customers increased sevenfold, and the Claude Code product generated over $500 million in run‑rate revenue, with usage growing more than tenfold since its full launch. The round was led by ICONIQ, Fidelity Management & Research Company and Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from Qatar Investment Authority, TPG, Altimeter, Blackstone, Coatue and General Catalyst. Weiterlesen