Recommendations from Zach at a16z
companies to take a look at
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To help you figure out what’s next, we asked Zach Cohen (partner at a16z) for recommendations on companies they would recommend people think about joining. Below you’ll find their answers, as well as explanations as to what makes each company particularly special.
Zach’s recommendations:
“Building Foundation Model for Mental Health” - Slingshot is building their own foundational model via pre-training, post-training, and RLHF. They have made great strides making their model perform similar to a therapist which has a very different reward model than a general LLM. They have already shipped the fastest voice AI therapist with their first proprietary model. The team is a repeat consumer founder and a cracked MLE, moving faster than the speed of light.”
“Building an AI-native workflow platform for Fashion” - Raspberry is fine-tuning image models with a breadth of data and controlnets to make going from idea generation to CAD model design take minutes, not months. They have already signed deals to support marketing, design, and finance teams across multi-billion dollar brands. The most interesting part is that there are the same number of designers as developers globally so this is a greatly overlooked software category that is primed for AI disruption.
“Building AI audio” - ElevenLabs is redefining the audio space in AI via their own apps, workflow tool, and APIs. The company has quickly become the de-facto TTS model due to the extensibility and ease of use of their tool. They have been shipping and iterating fast and are one of the fastest growing companies in the AI space. We think voice is a massive unlock in AI and Eleven is capturing this trend. Check out their conversational real-time AI its pretty amazing.
“Building an AI video creation platform” - Captions redefines both video editing and video creation with AI. The company is quickly becoming a leader in video generation and has the ambitious goal to allow people to create photorealistic avatars of themselves. Video is the fastest growing part of the internet and Captions wants to be the go-to product for creators.
Thanks for reading - let us know if you have any ideas or feedback - hi@nextplay.so.
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