Artificial intelligence
fromFortune
4 hours agoThe AI gold rush is real - but great companies don't need to mine it | Fortune
AI dominates investment conversations, but not all successful companies need to be AI-focused.
You just have to immerse yourself in it. You should just constantly be building. That's what's going to give you the best chance of having the relevant skill set that is needed to make a difference in technology.
In the AI era, it should be easier than ever for people to build new businesses. We want to build the services that enable this. This is important for ensuring that people broadly share in the prosperity created by superintelligence.
Venture capital firms, hedge funds, crypto companies, and tech startups have relocated from San Francisco and New York, drawn by zero state income tax, a business-friendly regulatory environment, and a growing talent base. The city's ecosystem now spans fintech, AI, defense tech, and crypto, creating ripple effects for regional banks, payment networks, homebuilders, and data infrastructure companies.
Empirical Ventures has secured a £10 million commitment from the British Business Bank through its Regional Angels Programme, bringing the Bank's total support for the firm to £15 million. This funding will allow Empirical to write larger cheques to early-stage science-led founders across the UK, particularly outside London.
Christian Gibson and Noah Shpak are both listed as members of Thinking Machines Lab's founding team on an earlier version of its website. Both have been working at Meta for a few weeks, according to sources familiar with the matter. Gibson is a former OpenAI engineer who specializes in supercomputers used for training AI models and who worked on the first ChatGPT model.
Wizard, an AI-native shopping agent cofounded by Marc Lore and CEO Melissa Bridgeford, is coming out of a nearly 5-year private beta with an ambitious promise: to end the era of endless scrolling in ecommerce and replace it with a personalized and streamlined shopping experience. Launched publicly on Feb. 11, the New York-based startup is betting that the next wave of online retail will be driven not by bigger marketplaces,
We have under development approximately 26,000 acres across two jurisdictions with the infrastructure necessary to support power generation and compute capacity at scale. Each Wonder Valley campus is expected to provide 7.5 gigawatts of power generation capacity, creating a combined initial power plan of 15 gigawatts.
The business is pulling its EMEA operations and activities back into its headquarters in Paris, France just seven months after it set up a London base. Executives in London were tasked with selling to media agencies the Adikteev's MotionLead technology, which creates bespoke mobile ad units, and it is understood that the first local campaigns for the formats had been secured.
AI has quietly unlocked some of the biggest opportunities I've seen in content and marketing. Inside enterprise, the shift is already happening. Massive budgets are moving into AI-driven writing, editing, and distribution - because results are measurable and speed matters more.
As the race to dominate AI accelerates, Europe's most prominent AI startup is betting that geography - not just technology - can be a competitive advantage in its home market. Arthur Mensch, the CEO and cofounder of French AI company Mistral, said the company's edge in Europe over Silicon Valley rivals like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic isn't about having dramatically smarter models.
Marketers have spent decades optimising for blue links on a search results page. Now every CMO conversation starts with the same question: 'How do we look in ChatGPT?' People ask an AI assistant and get a short list of recommended options. If your brand isn't in that answer, you're effectively invisible, even if you did everything 'right' in SEO. Kime exists to make that visibility gap measurable and give teams a way to act on it.
Even before he'd graduated from the University of Bath in 2024, Arnau Ayerbe landed a highly coveted role as an AI engineer with JP Morgan - yet he felt limited and uninspired. "I realised very quickly that the person to my right and to my left were going to be me in 20 years, and I didn't want to become that," recalls London-based Ayerbe.
When you're starting off, you solve problems with code. When you get more experienced, you solve problems with people. When you get even more experienced, you solve problems with money. In other words: You can be the person writing the code, and solving the problem directly. Or you can manage people, specifying what they should do. Or you can invest in teams, telling them about the problems you want to solve, but letting them set specific goals and managing the day-to-day work.
Finding an investor is never as simple as sending out a deck and waiting. It usually happens after a long stretch of figuring out who might care about what you are building, why your idea matters, and whether the timing is right. Most founders eventually discover that fundraising is part strategy, part patience, and part culture. Europe's startup scene is wide and diverse, so the path you choose depends on how well you understand the market around you.