Venture capital continues to pour into the generative artificial intelligence industry as the popularity of chatbots and image-generating AI continues to grip enterprise interests.

Today several generative AI startups received funding, including the chatbot startup Inflection AI Inc., the AI-powered video generator startup Runway AI Inc. and text-to-image generator Stability AI Ltd.

Inflection AI, an AI startup building chatbot that it calls a “Personal AI,” or Pi, which acts as a creative partner for users, raised a staggering $1.3 billion in new funding led by Microsoft Corp., Reid Hoffman, Bill Gates, Eric Schmidt and new investor Nvidia Corp. The fundraise brings the company’s funding to a total of $1.525 billion. TechCrunch reported places the valuation of Infection at $4 billion.

The company was launched in 2022 by Mustafa Suleyman, the co-founder of Alphabet Inc.’s DeepMind AI research unit, with the intent of building a more personal AI than those that currently exist on the market. According to the company Pi, which was introduced in May, is designed to “give people a new way to express themselves, share their curiosities and experience a trusted personal AI.”

Inflection AI is partnering with CoreWeave, a graphical processing unit accelerated cloud provider and Nvidia to build the largest AI cluster in the world, Infection said. It will comprise 22,000 Nvidia H100 Tensor Core GPUs and will house the company’s in-house built sophisticated large language models.

Inflection’s Pi chatbot is currently available for the public to access and chat with on the web for free, as well as mobile, Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger.

Runway AI today announced it raised $141 million in an extension of its $50 million Series C funding round in December, with participation from Alphabet’s Google LLC, Nvidia, Salesforce Ventures and other existing investors. This newest round brings the total funding for the company to about $237 million and values the company at $1.5 billion, according to Bloomberg.

Runway develops AI models for image generation and video editing and creation tasks that allow users to input text prompts. In March, the company debuted its Gen-2 AI model for creating vivid videos from text prompts that can produce high-fidelity clips from natural language prompts given by a user.

The original Gen-1 model required an existing video as input and could take user prompts to edit it – such as changing the color of objects. However, Gen-2 can produce its own video clips based on a text prompt from a user. For example, a user can just type in something such as, “A group of people walking down the street with black umbrellas and one with a red umbrella in the rain,” and it will create a scene.

“We’re rebuilding the creative stack from the ground up and developing impactful research that will be a major force of change across industries,” said Runway co-founder and Chief Executive Cristóbal Valenzuela. “The next phase of storytelling will be highly democratized, and our ultimate goal is to create a more equitable, diverse and creative world through our products and research outputs.”

The company helped Stability AI co-create Stable Diffusion, one of the best-known text-to-image generative AI models on the market, which can produce both surreal artwork and lifelike images from text prompts. Stable Diffusion launched in August 2022 and led to Stability AI’s rise to prominence.

Fundraising may not be entirely roses, however, as Stability AI has reportedly raised $25 million by way of a convertible note from investors amid funding troubles, according to Bloomberg, citing sources with knowledge of the matter.

The company was previously reported to be seeking to quadruple its valuation to $4 billion but still retains its $1 billion valuation that it attained during its $101 million seed funding round in October. That deal did not close after conversations with investors and the company is not currently looking to raise money at that valuation level.

According to the Bloomberg report, Stability AI Motez Bishara spokesperson denied the reporting, saying that the company has not been struggling to raise funds.

“We have not been actively fundraising or launched a formal round, and have not had fundraising problems,” Bishara said in a statement.

The convertible note provides Stability AI a tool to raise money between funding rounds to bring in money by using short-term debt that will convert to equity. These notes are often used in conjunction with a future financing round.

Stability CEO Emad Mostaque further addressed funding questions last week during the Bloomberg Technology Summit, saying the company was not seeking more funding, but interest continued to flow in. “We’re not trying to raise more, but we have constant interest,” said Mostaque.

Image: Pixabay