aVenture is in Alpha: aVenture recently launched early public access to our research product. It's intended to illustrate capabilities and gather feedback from users. While in Alpha, you should expect the research data to be limited and may not yet meet our exacting standards. We've made the decision to temporarily present this information to showcase the product's potential, but you should not yet rely upon it for your investment decisions.
aVenture is in Alpha: aVenture recently launched early public access to our research product. It's intended to illustrate capabilities and gather feedback from users. While in Alpha, you should expect the research data to be limited and may not yet meet our exacting standards. We've made the decision to temporarily present this information to showcase the product's potential, but you should not yet rely upon it for your investment decisions.
© aVenture Investment Company, 2025. All rights reserved.
44 Tehama St, San Francisco, CA 94105
Privacy Policy
aVenture Investment Company ("aVenture") is an independent venture capital research platform providing detailed analysis and data on startups, venture capital investments, and key industry individuals.
While we strive to provide valuable insights with objectivity and professional diligence, we cannot guarantee the accuracy of the information provided on our platform. Before making any investment decisions, you should verify the accuracy of all pertinent details for your decision.
aVenture does not offer investment advisory services and is not registered as an investment adviser. The data provided by aVenture does not constitute recommendations or advice, whether by methodology or a statement written by a staff member of aVenture.
Links to external websites do not imply endorsement or affiliation with aVenture. References or links to providers offering the ability to invest in a primary or secondary transaction in a company are for convenience purposes only. They are not solicitations or offers to buy or sell an investment. Remember that past performance does not guarantee future results, and venture capital and private assets should be a contributory part of a diversified portfolio.
From TechCrunch
By Kyle Wiggers
June 22, 2024
The majority of companies struggle to extract value from their data. Several years ago, Forrester reported that between 60% and 73% of data belonging to the average business goes unused for analytics. That’s because the data’s siloed or otherwise pigeonholed by technical and security considerations, making it difficult — if not impossible — to apply analytical tools.
Anna Pojawis and Tyler Maran, engineers who previously did stints at Y Combinator-backed startups Hightouch (a data-syncing platform) and Fair Square (a health insurance tool), were inspired to try their hands at solving the data value problem after discovering that many companies had been “locked out” of analytics strategies due to the engineering roadblocks.
“We’ve found that a significant part of the market, especially those in regulated industries like healthcare and finance,” have struggled with data analytics, Maran told TechCrunch. “The majority of corporate data doesn’t fit into a database today; it’s sales calls, documents, Slack messages and so on. And, given the scale of these companies, off-the-shelf data models are typically not sufficient.”
So Pojawis and Maran founded OmniAI, a set of tools that transform unstructured enterprise data into something that data analytics apps and AI can understand.
OmniAI syncs with a company’s data storage services and databases (e.g., Snowflake, MongoDB, etc.), preps the data within and allows companies to run the model of their choice — for example, a large language model — on the data. OmniAI performs all of its work in the company’s cloud, OmniAI’s private cloud or on-premises environments, delivering ostensibly improved security, according to Maran.
“We believe that large language models will become essential to a company’s infrastructure in the next decade, and having everything hosted in one place just makes sense,” Maran said.
Out of the box, OmniAI offers integrations with models, including Meta’s Llama 3, Anthropic’s Claude, Mistral’s Mistral Large and Amazon’s AWS Titan for use cases like automatically redacting sensitive information from data and generally building AI-powered applications. Customers sign a software-as-a-service contract with OmniAI to enable management of models on their infrastructure.
It’s early days. But Omni, which recently closed a $3.2 million seed round led by FundersClub at a $30 million valuation, claims to have 10 customers already, including Klaviyo and Carrefour. Annual recurring revenue is on track to reach $1 million by 2025, Maran said.
“We’re an incredibly lean team in a fast-growing industry,” Maran said. “Our bet is that, over time, companies will opt for running models alongside their existing infrastructure, and model providers will focus more on licensing model weights to existing cloud providers.”
Share:
Sesame, the startup behind the viral virtual assistant Maya, releases its base AI model
AI company Sesame has released the base model that powers Maya, the impressively realistic voice assistant. The model, which is 1 billion parameters in size (“parameters” referring to individual components of the model), is under an Apache 2.0 license, meaning it can be used commercially with few restrictions. Called CSM-1B, the model generates “RVQ audio codes” from text and audio inputs, according to Sesame’s description on the AI dev platform Hugging Face. RVQ refers to “residual vector quan
Mar 13, 2025
Y Combinator’s police surveillance darling Flock Safety raises $275M at $7.5B valuation
Flock Safety and one of its long-time VCs, Bedrock Capital, announced Thursday that the startup raised a fresh $275 million at a $7.5 billion valuation. Flock makes computer vision-enabled video surveillance technology used by law enforcement as well as businesses, property management companies, and so on. It’s best known for its automatic license plate recognition tech, but Flock also makes gunshot detection tech marketed to schools, and recently acquired public safety drone company Aerodome.
Mar 13, 2025
Y Combinator urges the White House to support Europe’s Digital Markets Act
Y Combinator, one of the world’s most prolific startup accelerators, sent a letter on Wednesday urging the Trump administration to openly support Europe’s Digital Markets Act (DMA), a wide-ranging piece of legislation that aims to crack open Big Tech’s market power. The DMA designates six tech companies as “gatekeepers” to the internet — Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, ByteDance, Meta, and Microsoft — and limits these technology kingpins from engaging in anticompetitive tactics on their platforms, in
Mar 13, 2025
Don't miss our latest news and updates. Subscribe to the newsletter