Enterprises’ proprietary data, structured and unstructured, is key to customizing models for their own use cases, like content creation and natural language search.
“Helping customers understand their data, and how to prepare their data for those use cases, is what we're doing today.”
Data complexity is a barrier to AI adoption for 25% of enterprises surveyed by IBM last year — the #2 challenge behind limited AI expertise.
Meanwhile, enterprises are focused on improving their data quality, to minimize the downstream effects of poor-quality data on AI performance.
One customer of Together AI, an infrastructure provider and model developer, told us about the gap in the market:
Data management startups are helping businesses tap into or reengineer their data structures to extract value.
This was a big focus within our Future Tech Hotshots report — a list of 52 emerging tech startups with the highest momentum and potential for a major exit. All have <100 employees.
There were 6 data management startups that made the cut.
For example, Anomalo, which was founded by 2 former Instacart executives, is focused on using AI to automatically detect issues in data quality.
Elsewhere, leading cloud data management companies like Databricks and Snowflake, which help companies connect their sources of data for processing and analysis, are moving to capture more enterprise AI clients by supporting additional data formats.
For example, Databricks acquired data management company Tabular for north of $1B in June 2024.
The goal? Provide better data compatibility for its customers, allowing them to use their data across different formats and reduce data silos.
93% of you voted to keep TLDR last week so we’re back again.
Here's a roundup of our favorite recent tech drama:
Step down: The billionaire CEO of Australia’s largest listed technology company WiseTech Global stepped down after a series of allegations around bullying and other inappropriate behavior emerged.
Flopped: San Francisco's transportation agency has agreed to pay $212M to get its light rail system off of floppy disks, which have been used as part of its train control system since 1998. Yes — you read that right — San Francisco.
Florida youth: 2 tech industry groups are trying to overturn a new Florida law that prohibits anyone <14 from most social media platforms. According to the tech groups, they’re very worried the law “infringes on First Amendment rights” and creates “significant barriers to accessing online information that every American, including minors, has a right to see.”
Not first class: Delta Airlines is suing CrowdStrike over the global tech outage in July that grounded thousands of flights. Delta is accusing CrowdStrike of gross negligence.
Don’t say cheese: Norfolk, Virginia is being sued in a lawsuit that claims license plate-reading cameras enable warrantless surveillance, which the plaintiffs say is a violation of the Fourth Amendment.
Fact toll: Perplexity was hit with new copyright infringement lawsuits from the Wall Street Journal’s parent Dow Jones and New York Post. The AI startup clapped back in a blog post: “[Media companies] prefer to live in a world where publicly reported facts are owned by corporations, and no one can do anything with those publicly reported facts without paying a toll.”
Pinned down: Humane has dropped the price of its Ai Pin by $200 to $499. In August, returns of the device reportedly began to outpace sales. If you buy it for $499 and don’t open it, I’ll buy it from you for $50 next October. Deal?
Arm wrestle: Arm is canceling Qualcomm’s chip design license, escalating the two companies’ feud. The move could force Qualcomm to stop selling the processors that power most Android smartphones.
Deception: Peer-to-peer lending platform Solo Funds is facing lawsuits from its users and state officials for engaging in deceptive practices. The CFPB alleges the company deceived borrowers about the total cost of loans and illegally extracted fees.
