Latest news with #RedpointVentures
Business Insider
11-07-2025
- Business
- Business Insider
Anam builds digital humans that can have lifelike conversations. Read the pitch deck that it used to raise $9 million.
Anam has raised $9 million to build AI personas that can converse in real time. The Redpoint-backed company was cofounded by two Synthesia veterans in late 2023. Anam has 2,000 clients and is tracking $5 million in annual revenue, cofounder Caoimhe Murphy said. Redpoint Ventures, with participation from SV Angel, led the latest round. Anam, founded in October 2023 and named for the Irish word for "soul," had previously raised a $2.3 million pre-seed led by Concept Ventures. Today, Anam has 2,000 clients ranging across education, sales, customer support, healthcare, and beyond. The hair brand Schwarzkopf uses Anam as an education tool for stylists, for instance, while language learning platform Preply uses it to simulate learning environments. Other competitors like Tavus and HeyGen are also trying to solve what is a vastly difficult technical problem, Anam cofounder and CEO Caoimhe Murphy told Business Insider — from flawless lip syncing to realistic facial movement to near-immediate response times to the ability to scale to hundreds of thousands of users. "There's no real winner right now," she said of the race to build the highest quality product. "That's why the market's so exciting." Anam generates every pixel of its avatars, Murphy said, as opposed to how other rivals may only partially generate avatars or use a video on loop and just dub the mouth. "That's where real expressivity and natural conversation comes through," she said. The company recently released a feature called One-Shot, which can generate an AI persona from a photograph in minutes. Murphy and Ben Carr, Anam's cofounder and CTO, previously worked together at AI video unicorn Synthesia. Murphy worked in sales, and Carr worked as an AI research engineer. Anam has 16 employees and is tracking $5 million in revenue this year, Murphy said. It makes money by charging per minute of conversation. "They're building the next interface layer between humans and machines," Redpoint partner Meera Clark said in a statement. Here's a look at the pitch deck Anam used to raise $9 million in seed funding. A slide has been redacted to share the deck publicly. Three key bets have allowed us to solve this problem. We are the first company to develop a custom diffusion model and train it on specific data and we have built custom infrastructure to support delivery at speed and scale. Our bets focused on the hardest components of the problem We're changing the status quo Use cases Interview assistant -- leverage Anam's technology to practice interviews or even run them!
Business Insider
11-07-2025
- Business
- Business Insider
Anam builds digital humans that can have lifelike conversations. Read the pitch deck that it used to raise $9 million.
Anam, an AI startup building digital humans that can have lifelike conversations, has raised $9 million in seed funding. Redpoint Ventures, with participation from SV Angel, led the latest round. Anam, founded in October 2023 and named for the Irish word for "soul," had previously raised a $2.3 million pre-seed led by Concept Ventures. Today, Anam has 2,000 clients ranging across education, sales, customer support, healthcare, and beyond. The hair brand Schwarzkopf uses Anam as an education tool for stylists, for instance, while language learning platform Preply uses it to simulate learning environments. Other competitors like Tavus and HeyGen are also trying to solve what is a vastly difficult technical problem, Anam cofounder and CEO Caoimhe Murphy told Business Insider — from flawless lip syncing to realistic facial movement to near-immediate response times to the ability to scale to hundreds of thousands of users. "There's no real winner right now," she said of the race to build the highest quality product. "That's why the market's so exciting." Anam generates every pixel of its avatars, Murphy said, as opposed to how other rivals may only partially generate avatars or use a video on loop and just dub the mouth. "That's where real expressivity and natural conversation comes through," she said. The company recently released a feature called One-Shot, which can generate an AI persona from a photograph in minutes. Murphy and Ben Carr, Anam's cofounder and CTO, previously worked together at AI video unicorn Synthesia. Murphy worked in sales, and Carr worked as an AI research engineer. Anam has 16 employees and is tracking $5 million in revenue this year, Murphy said. It makes money by charging per minute of conversation. "They're building the next interface layer between humans and machines," Redpoint partner Meera Clark said in a statement. Here's a look at the pitch deck Anam used to raise $9 million in seed funding. A slide has been redacted to share the deck publicly. Anam Anam Anam Anam Anam Anam Anam Anam Anam Anam Anam Anam Anam Anam Anam Anam
Business Insider
07-07-2025
- Business
- Business Insider
VC firm Redpoint tells startups to buckle up for a hiring showdown. Here's the 13-slide deck it shared with founders.
Tech is hiring again, but the roles and skills in demand look different this time around. Atli Thorkelsson, head of network at Redpoint Ventures, put together a slide deck on hiring trends. The top of the market is "the most competitive it's been in years," Thorkelsson said. The tech industry is now split between two starkly different job markets. On one side, there's a stalled job market where more workers are staying put. On the other there is a rapidly expanding artificial intelligence sector that's reshaping the talent landscape. To help founders understand the situation, Atli Thorkelsson, head of talent network at Redpoint Ventures, created a slide deck on the state of tech hiring. He presented it at the firm's third annual InfraRed Summit, which brings together founders of up-and-coming companies in cloud infrastructure. The deck includes data cobbled together from Pave, a compensation management tool; TrueUp, a tech jobs marketplace; and SignalFire, an early-stage venture capital firm. Thorkelsson notes that the charts throughout the deck represent fast-growing tech firms. Since Redpoint used data from vendors that mainly serve tech clients with open roles, those companies end up overrepresented. Here's an exclusive look at the 13-slide deck that Redpoint shared with founders. Tech is hiring again, but the roles and skills in demand look different this time around. The top of the market is "the most competitive it's been in years," Thorkelsson said. Throkelsson said more employees are staying put in a tougher job market. Retention is key. An analysis of pay data suggests companies are burning more equity and cash to keep people happy. The companies that are hiring are hiring across the board. The bulk of new hires have gone to AI companies. Entry-level hiring is on the decline. An efficiency drive means leaner teams packed with battle-tested veterans. AI companies tilt toward technical talent more than their peers at the same stage. Premium talent is landing at AI firms, and with that comes premium paychecks. Machine learning engineers are pulling in more cash and equity than their software engineering counterparts. Interviews are getting more AI-focused. Candidates are being asked about their AI skills far more often than a year ago. In recent years, some HR teams toyed with shorter or front-loaded vesting schedules. Now, most are reverting to the standard linear vest, sticking with what candidates already understand, Thorkelsson said. San Francisco still leads for AI jobs, but New York City is gaining ground as a tech hub.
Business Insider
27-06-2025
- Business
- Business Insider
Startup funding announcements are getting the TikTok treatment, thanks to Gen Z founders
The video opens with Isaiah Granet hanging up a payphone in wine country in Napa, California. A vintage car shaped like a rotary telephone rolls into frame. It's not a surrealist short or an art school final project. It's a launch video for a startup. The classic "We're excited to announce —" funding post is getting the TikTok treatment. Bland, an AI startup making phone agents, is one of an increasing number of tech startups — mostly led by Gen Z founders — that are swapping static social media posts for slick launch videos to promote their venture rounds. With media coverage harder to secure and social posts fading fast, startups are rethinking how they share big news. And increasingly, they're pivoting to video. It's a format that's harder to ignore and more likely to stick around in the feed. "For startups, it's really hard to get PR," said Josh Machiz, who advises founders on storytelling at Redpoint Ventures. "It's even more crucial that they learn how to master their own media." Each founder has their own cinematic take on "we raised." There's the TED-style founder monologue, like the one from restaurant software developer Owner's Adam Guild. His hair perfectly coiffed, he delivers a straight-to-camera sermon about his company's $120 million raise. Then there's the sizzle reel, packed with quick cuts and a dramatic voiceover. Take Base Power's high-octane montage of people across eras flicking on the lights, in an ode to modern electricity. The most ambitious and likely the most expensive is the narrative short. Cluely's 90-second rom-com follows a hapless guy on a first date, coached by the company's AI cheat overlay, which feeds him real-time lines to win the girl. The launch video cost $140,000 to produce, said founder Chungin "Roy" Lee, and it paid off. It went viral, and the usage surge crashed Cluely's servers. "Right now, more companies are getting built than ever," Lee said, "and the only way to hit escape velocity and cut through the noise is by making big swings, like our launch video." Go direct Funding is flowing to tech startups again, especially if you've got OpenAI on your résumé or a pitch to reinvent software with " vibe." Founders often take to X and LinkedIn to toast their raises, sharing a link to their blog posts and maybe a nod to TechCrunch for the coverage. It's a strategy that's simply less effective than it used to be. A standard social post might get attention for half a day until it slides off the feed and disappears, said Kyle Tibbitts, chief marketing officer at Wander, a vacation rental company. But the algorithms don't downgrade video like they do links, said Ashley Mayer, who led comms at Box and Glossier before becoming an investor. Mayer said startups still chase traditional media coverage but increasingly find the door shut. Newsrooms are shrinking, and many now prioritize breaking news and subscription-driving exclusives over commodity funding announcements. Bland's Granet said their media pitches for the $40 million Series B round went nowhere. Plus, "Paywalls kind of suck," he said, questioning whether the effort was even worth the reach. 'A photo is good, but a video is worth a thousand photos' At Wander, Tibbitts said making a fundraise video was a no-brainer. The company already had hard drives full of footage from its luxury vacation rentals. Each listing features a video tour, complete with sweeping drone shots. "A photo is good," Tibbitts said, "but a video is worth a thousand photos." Founder John Andrew Entwistle, who is 27, and a videographer, filmed his portion of the fundraise video in May on location at the company's very first property, a waterfront home in Mendocino County, California. Entwistle read the script off a laptop screen with the text enlarged, in what Tibbitts called a "very minimum viable teleprompter." He estimated the production, including outsourced editing, cost about $2,000. Three days after Wander announced its $50 million raise, the company notched a record $275,000 in bookings in one day. For Hedra, the fundraise video doubled as a demo of the startup's digital avatars. Founder Michael Lingelbach appears in a range of styles: Studio Ghibli, Pixar, and a hyperreal, slightly more jacked version of himself sporting a gold chain inspired by Mark Zuckerberg's tech-bro glow-up. "Even this video was made in a fraction of the time it would've taken otherwise," Lingelbach says in the video, while appearing as a crochet doll version of himself, seated on a yarn-woven couch. A marketing employee wrote the script, Hedra's own multimodal model generated the voiceover, and a freelance editor stitched it all together. Lingelbach wouldn't say what it cost — only that "people spend a scarily large fraction of their seed round on these kinds of things." His advice to other founders was to get bids from multiple studios. The trend has taken off since last fall, said freelance director Nicholas Carpo, when he produced his first fundraise video for a " Tinder for jobs" app. Since then, he's averaged two to three videos a month for startups between seed and Series B. Budgets range from $10,000 to $90,000, Carpo said, depending on how ambitious the concept is and how many people it takes to pull off. That's an industry range, not necessarily his own pricing. For some startups, a fundraise video isn't just for show. It might catch the eye of a new customer or a hard-to-hire engineer. Going viral might prompt a blue-chip investor to slide into the company's DMs. First impressions in startup land don't come cheap — or twice. "You only come out of stealth once," Carpo said. "If you don't get it right, your chances of making it to the next stage are tougher."
Business Wire
10-06-2025
- Business
- Business Wire
AI Code Review Pioneer CodeRabbit Recognized in Redpoint's InfraRed 100
WALNUT CREEK, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- CodeRabbit, the most advanced AI code review platform, today announced its inclusion on the Redpoint InfraRed 100. This prestigious list highlights the 100 up-and-coming private companies in Cloud Infrastructure, showcasing the future leaders set to revolutionize the market. CodeRabbit, the most advanced AI code review platform, today announced its inclusion on the Redpoint InfraRed 100. CodeRabbit integrates foundational gen-AI models with multiple data sources that enhance the code context, leading to higher quality reviews, cutting down code review time and bugs in half. CodeRabbit's AI code reviews have been rapidly adopted by customers including The Linux Foundation, Groupon, Chegg, Trivago, and many more. Redpoint Ventures, a top-tier venture capital firm with a diverse portfolio including companies such as Snowflake, Twilio, Looker, Nextdoor, Ramp, Stripe, Nubank, HashiCorp, Netflix, Hims, and more, launched this list in 2023 to showcase the exceptional builders in the industry who are creating industry-transforming companies. To commemorate this achievement, CodeRabbit's co-founder and CEO Harjot Gill will join Redpoint at Nasdaq with other InfraRed 100 leaders to discuss the evolving landscape of cloud infrastructure. 'We are honored to be recognized in the InfraRed 100, especially alongside such a distinguished group of cloud infrastructure companies. We founded CodeRabbit with the mission to transform code reviews with AI to help developers automate the tedious parts of software development. We believe that AI, when augmented with appropriate context and implemented with the right guardrails will identify defects that are hard to catch in manual reviews, leading to fewer bugs and faster release cycles,' said Gill. 'We thank the team at Redpoint for this recognition and congratulate all the companies on the list.' For the complete list of companies included on this year's InfraRed 100 list and to read the full InfraRed industry report, click here. About CodeRabbit CodeRabbit is the pioneer of the AI code review category, evolving the historically manual and low-context review process into a more automated, context-aware workflow that's compatible with today's highly dynamic CI/CD pipeline. CodeRabbit enables engineering organizations that use code-gen agents to generate code at a fast pace to identify code quality issues before production, reducing code review cycles and allowing developers to reclaim valuable time. Headquartered in Walnut Creek, California, and funded by CRV, Flex Capital, and Engineering Capital, CodeRabbit is on a mission to transform code quality, security, and developer productivity with AI. Try CodeRabbit free at: About Redpoint Ventures: Redpoint has partnered with visionary founders to create new markets and redefine existing ones since 1999. We invest in startups across the seed, early and growth phases, and we're proud to have backed over 615 companies—including Snowflake, Looker, Kustomer, Twilio, 2U, DraftKings, Duo Security, HashiCorp, Stripe, Guild, HomeAway, Heroku, Netflix, and Sonos—with 183 IPOs and M+A exits. Redpoint manages $8.0 billion across multiple funds. For more information visit:
