Latest news with #JennyLee
Forbes
04-07-2025
- Business
- Forbes
Venture Gapital
Jenny Lee, senior managing partner of Granite Asia. In a widely read scorecard, Silicon Valley Bank, now a division of First Citizens Bank and a lender to venture capital-backed startups, reported that 'series A tech deals underperformed our expectation [for 2024], hitting the lowest level since 2012.' While moderate growth is expected this year, the bank predicts levels are still lower than a decade ago. What explains the early-stage sag? Higher interest rates? Years of a blocked-up IPO market? This columnist suspects another reason. Today's investment giants are so big they can't really focus on seed rounds. Small VC firms face their own problem. They lack deep pockets, or connections, for later rounds. This leaves Jenny Lee, senior managing partner of Singapore's Granite Asia, in a good spot. Over two decades, Granite's early investments have led to 48 unicorns and 30 IPOs. Granite now has $5 billion under management. That's small enough to make focused seed bets. But large enough to partner with megafirms in later rounds. Lee says by email, 'If anything, Granite is seeing healthy and accelerating momentum' in seed funding for AI startups. These days, Lee likes AI-native apps that solve real-world problems—'transforming human-centric processes in logistics, manufacturing, healthcare and education into AI-powered systems. And they're doing so with lower compute needs and greater capital efficiency.' When it comes to how AI has altered the economics in the VC industry, Lee says: 'AI-native companies scale faster but also hit infrastructure costs sooner. That compresses the time between seed and scale. It exposes investors to more follow-on risk earlier. At the same time, valuation expectations tend to inflate ahead of fundamentals.' As a global investor, 'we're seeing more balanced risk-reward ratios in Asia, where exceptional founders are still building under the radar,' she observes. Asia vs. U.S. Venture Capital The Asia model is less about blitzscaling [a description of hypergrowth, common to U.S. venture circles] and more about building with context. 'In the U.S., especially in the Bay Area, early-stage AI startups often scale fast on the back of open-source tooling, abundant capital and a well-worn playbook: build a demo, raise capital fast and chase valuation milestones. But in Asia, the road to product-market fit is shaped by real constraints—fragmented markets, regulatory nuance, cost-sensitive users and localization complexity,' notes Lee. 'These challenges force AI founders to innovate not just on technology, but on distribution, data access and business model design.' But what about talent? The U.S. and Silicon Valley are rich with AI superstars, but also expenses. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman claimed on a recent podcast that Meta was courting his AI engineers with $100 million signing bonuses. And don't forget options that could be worth hundreds of millions in a public stock offering. Granite's Lee observes that Asia's talent pool is better balanced—from China's robotics depth to India's developer base. 'The region has a deep bench of STEM talent, world-class manufacturing ecosystems and governments that actively support industrial automation and digital infrastructure. That combination is producing a new generation of founders who aren't just fine-tuning LLMs [large language models that undergird generative and agentic AI]. They're engineering autonomous robots for factories, building AI-empowered workflows, and developing full-stack solutions for mobility, logistics and healthcare.' 'These companies are often being embedded into physical infrastructure from the ground up, solving problems in dense cities, aging societies and complex supply chains, and in doing so, creating globally relevant innovations.' If Lee is right, then today's global drop in early-stage investments will be short-lived. An IPO boom will fatten VC coffers, and likely reawaken interest in early stage. One way or the other, Jenny Lee and Granite Asia will be there. They never left.
Globe and Mail
25-06-2025
- Business
- Globe and Mail
Centific, the Market-Leading Enabler of Advanced AI, Closes Transformative $60M Series A Round
Granite Asia invests in Centific's $60M Series A, led by Midas List investor Jenny Lee, to fuel the company's expansion as the independent AI data backbone for the next wave of global agentic AI systems.
Cision Canada
25-06-2025
- Business
- Cision Canada
Centific, the Market-Leading Enabler of Advanced AI, Closes Transformative $60M Series A Round USA - English USA - English USA
Granite Asia invests in Centific's $60M Series A, led by Midas List investor Jenny Lee, to fuel the company's expansion as the independent AI data backbone for the next wave of global agentic AI systems. SEATTLE, June 25, 2025 /CNW/ -- Centific, the AI Data Foundry trusted by the world's top model builders, AI labs, and enterprise innovators, today announced the close of its $60 million Series A funding round, led by long-time Midas Lister Jenny Lee of Granite Asia, an investment firm behind 56 unicorns and 31 IPOs globally. Founded in 2020, Centific has operated behind the scenes to power many of the world's most transformative AI breakthroughs. Today, the company equips innovators with the infrastructure, oversight and deep expertise required to develop and safely deploy foundational models, multimodal systems and next-generation agentic AI; intelligent platforms that perceive, reason and act at scale. Centific is a recognized innovation partner to NVIDIA, selected for its leadership in real-world Vision and Language AI inferencing. The company was recently featured by Jensen Huang at both CES and GTC as a leading innovation partner, underscoring its role in helping scale AI from prototype to production. "Enterprises globally are moving from AI experimentation to enterprise-wide deployment, but the journey requires scale, trust, and deep integration with legacy systems. Centific is built for this moment." Said Jenny Lee, Senior Managing Partner at Granite Asia." With its global delivery infrastructure, strong existing client base, and commitment to safe, responsible AI, it is uniquely positioned to become a foundational partner in the enterprise AI stack. At Granite Asia, we back the builders of enduring infrastructure for the future of industry, and Centific reflects that vision." Powering the Frontier of AI with safety, speed, and scale As organizations move beyond model training into large-scale, real-world AI applications, Centific delivers the technical sophistication, governance frameworks, and expert oversight required to succeed. "AI is evolving from isolated models to fully agentic systems that perceive, reason, and act at scale," said Venkat Rangapuram, CEO of Centific. "Our full-stack Data Foundry meets this moment by combining deep domain expertise, human-in-the-loop assurance, and true multimodal orchestration—all delivered with unmatched speed and scale." A future-ready platform for real-world AI Centific's AI Data Foundry brings together a global network of experts across 1000's of domains in STEM, vertical and professional, and consumer and lifestyle, human-in-the-loop assurance with built-in QA checkpoints and escalation paths to eliminate bias, hallucinations, and failures, true multimodal orchestration supporting complex prompts across text, image, video, audio, 3D, and spatial data, and unmatched speed and scalability to deploy, localize, and contextualize AI at the enterprise, citywide, and national levels. Centific's AI Data Foundry integrates every component organizations need to power safe, scalable agentic AI deployments: Infrastructure-Agnostic Deployment: Scale models seamlessly across cloud, core, edge, and far-edge environments to deliver truly transformational experiences High-Precision Model Training: Workflow-orchestrated datasets fine-tune LLMs and domain-specific agents with unparalleled accuracy Optimized AI Inferencing: Low-latency, high-assurance pipelines for perception-based Vision and Language AI in production Agentic AI Experiences: Digital twins, avatars, and multi-agent coordination that bring Physical AI to life Governance & Risk Mitigation: Human-in-the-loop validation, synthetic-data controls, and audit-ready compliance workflows integrated at every stage Trusted by the Magnificent Seven, top model labs, and Fortune 500 organizations, Centific's Data Foundry provides a secure, repeatable infrastructure that keeps pace with rapid innovation while minimizing operational and regulatory risk. Deploying capital to drive next-gen AI innovation With this foundation in place, Centific is channeling this new capital into four key areas: Expand Functionality & Capabilities: Enhance our platform to accelerate the journey from prototype to production; delivering resilient, agile systems finely tuned for real-world impact. Supercharge R&D Frontiers: Continue research and innovation programs fueling breakthroughs and pushing the frontiers of model architectures, Vision AI, and specialized AI; driving cutting-edge advancements. Scale the Enterprise AI Backbone: Cement Centific's position as the foundational partner; powering mission-critical AI deployments at the speed of innovation. Amplify Strategic Ecosystem Alliances: Deepen collaborations with NVIDIA, Microsoft, AWS, Dell, Lenovo, and GPU-as-a-Service leaders; driving global adoption. "This funding round isn't about necessity, it's about ambition. Having trained most the world's leading AI models, our Zero Distance Innovation™ ethos now pivots to enterprise impact, unlocking industries' ability to deploy safe, scalable AI at speed and scale." said Venkat Rangapuram, CEO of Centific. "With significant interest from top-tier firms, we selected Granite Asia for their unrivaled track record in scaling early-stage tech innovators. Built profitably on a foundation of trust and global reach, this investment turbocharges our mission: to empower enterprises with AI systems that are resilient, agile, and meticulously fine-tuned." Looking ahead As demand for sovereign, secure, and scalable agentic AI infrastructure surges, Centific is perfectly poised to lead the charge. The company envisions AI evolving into an unseen yet indispensable layer of everyday life. Fueled by this vision, Centific is building a unified ecosystem, bringing together world-class talent, robust platforms, and cutting-edge technology, to power the next generation of AI-driven innovation. Centific powers the world's most advanced AI. As the trusted data and infrastructure partner for thousands of production-grade systems, Centific empowers innovators to scale models and agents across the full lifecycle—faster, safer, and with expert oversight. From perception-based inferencing to HITL-evaluated datasets, Centific is the backbone for the future of AI.
Bloomberg
21-05-2025
- Business
- Bloomberg
Claure, Lee & Mnuchin on Growth in a Complex Economy
Marcelo Claure, Co-Chairman & Partner, Brightstar Capital Partners & CEO & Founder, Claure Group; Jenny Lee, Senior Managing Partner, Granite Asia; and Steven T. Mnuchin, Founder & Managing Partner, Liberty Strategic Capital & Former Secretary, US Department of the Treasury discuss strategies for pursuing growth in a complex global economy with Bloomberg's Erik Schatzker at the 2025 Qatar Economic Forum, Powered by Bloomberg. (Source: Bloomberg)
