October 23, 2023

Multimodal Search Systems

↯ One big idea to spark your curiosity

Search is having its multimodal moment, and that’s going to change how we find and discover products, information, and entertainment. But multimodal search goes beyond just finding things. It can also change how we generate and interact with content.

At the heart of multimodal search systems like ours is a content understanding engine: a system that can ingest media of any kind and automatically “know” what’s in it without any tagging. That includes objects, landmarks, logos, colors, and even qualities such as sentiment (do the people in the image look happy?), actions (mountain biker doing a backflip), and fine details (the particular pattern on a wallpaper).

With an engine that understands content in all forms, we can unlock all sorts of new workflows and capabilities.

Summarize, Recommend, and Organize Content through Multimodal Search, Objective

Funding

↯ Developer-friendly companies that announced new funding rounds

Akahu, provider of an API for open banking in New Zealand, raised $1.4m in funding.

PickNik, creator of open source tools for the development, debugging, and deployment of robotic applications, raised $2m in pre-Seed funding.

Volteras, an API for accessing real-time data from electric vehicles and other energy devices, raised $2.9m in funding.

Aindo, a platform for generating and exchanging synthetic data that is privacy and security compliant, raised €6m in Series A funding.

Flanks, an API for automated wealth services, raised $8m in Series A funding.

Finzly, a universal API that allows developers to build applications that connect to users' bank accounts, raised $10m in Series A funding.

Objective, a platform for building AI-native search for any website, raised $13m in funding.

Pantomath, an end-to-end observability platform for data pipelines, raised $14m in Series A funding.

Fingerprint, a device intelligence platform that helps developers protect applications from fraud, spam, account takeover, bots, and other malicious activity, raised $33m in Series C funding.

Baichuan, a China-based developer of LLMs, including open source models, raised $300m in funding.

Zhipu, a China-based developer of LLMs and creator of the CodeGeeX coding assistant, raised $342m in funding.