AI Startups: LinkedIn Co-Founder’s Cancer Drug Venture, Intel Invests in Chiplets

This week in artificial intelligence startup news, Manas AI was created with the goal of shortening cancer drug development timelines, and Intel invested in chip company Baya Systems. Meanwhile, ElevenLabs raised $250 million, and Synthesia raised $180 million.

Reid Hoffman, venture capitalist and co-founder of LinkedIn, and cancer researcher Siddhartha Mukherjee debuted Manas AI Monday (Jan. 27).

The drug discovery startup aims to find a cure for certain cancers before expanding to drugs for other diseases. It will initially focus on finding drugs to treat breast cancer, prostate cancer and lymphoma.

“Like many of you, we’ve both had people close to us affected by cancer and other diseases,” Hoffman and Mukherjee wrote in a Monday blog post. “When we first discussed creating Manas, we shared a vision of a future where breakthrough treatments don’t take decades to develop.”

Manas AI hopes to shrink the drug discovery process from a decade to a few years by combining what it called human and synthetic intelligence, or researchers and AI. Together, they can explore chemical spaces and analyze molecular interactions 100 times faster than traditional methods, per the post.

The startup’s Project Cosmos aims to map the fundamental rules of drug binding, further speeding up drug discovery, the post said.

Manas AI is launching with $24.6 million in seed funding, led by General Catalyst with participation from Greylock Partners, where Hoffman is a partner, and other strategic investors. The funding will be used to scale the company’s AI platform, advance its drug candidate pipeline and expand its global clinical programs.

Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform will provide computing for the AI startup.

Chip startup Baya Systems raised more than $36 million in a Series B round, which it will use for operational growth and to develop its system-on-chip (SoC) designs for chiplets, according to a Jan. 23 press release.

Advancements in computing are changing how SoCs are designed to meet the growing demand for AI, efficient data processing and higher computational power. Traditional SoCs are becoming harder and more expensive to improve, so the industry is adopting a new SoC model that combines multiple smaller chips called chiplets. This configuration offers better performance, lower power usage and reduced costs.

The Series B was led by Maverick Silicon and backed by a strategic investment from Synopsys. Current investors Matrix Partners and Intel Capital reinvested in the company.

Jim Keller serves as the company’s chairman of the board. He worked at Apple, playing a key role in designing its A4 and A5 chips that powered early iPhones and iPads. He also led the development of Tesla’s autopilot chips. He was the lead architect for AMD’s Athlon K7 chip and its K8 microarchitecture, ushering in advances in computer power and efficiency.

AI synthetic voice creator ElevenLabs raised $250 million in a Series C funding round, valuing the company at $3 billion to $3.3 billion, TechCrunch reported Jan. 24. Iconiq Growth led the round.

ElevenLabs is known for its voice cloning. Its AI can take 30 minutes of high-quality audio to create a professional-sounding voice. The company has struck deals with the estates of Burt Reynolds, Judy Garland, James Dean and Sir Laurence Olivier to get rights to their voices. Using ElevenLabs’ Reader app, readers can listen to eBooks from a choice of celebrity voices.

The Series C came a year after ElevenLabs’ $80 million Series B round that valued the company at more than $1 billion.

Synthesia, which uses AI to create videos without cameras, actors or a studio, raised $180 million in a Series D funding round, according to a blog post.

It will use the capital to further enhance its platform for creating, collaborating and publishing AI videos, per the post. Users can input text to generate a video, choose an AI avatar that speaks any of 120 languages to appear in it, and customize the video with logos and backgrounds.

Corporate clients use these videos for employee training — rather than making them read text — to announce new policies and enliven PowerPoint slides, among other uses. Customers include Heineken, Zoom and Reuters.

New investors in the Series D — NEA, Atlassian Ventures, World Innovation Lab and PSP Growth — joined existing investors GV, FirstMark, Accel, Kleiner Perkins, MMC and others, per the post.

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