Tech AI juggernauts. It’s panic time. Olympics (go Femke; go Sifan!) and VP candidate picks: move over, it’s the perceived collapse of high-tech that dominates the start of this week’s news cycle. With US unemployment numbers nudging up, our AI tech-dominated Magnificent Seven lost $800 billion in market value Monday morning – and who knows where they’ll be at when you read this. 

But wait, didn’t I just read all these stunning Q2 financials last week from the folks who are pushing today’s AI revolution?

• Google parent Alphabet reported $24 billion net profit on $85 billion revenue.
• Microsoft reported $22 billion net profit on $65 billion revenue.
• Meta reported $13.5 billion net profit on $39 billion revenue.
• Apple reported $21 billion net profit on $86 billion revenue.
• Amazon reported $13.5 billion net profit on $148 billion revenue.
• (NVIDIA’s Q2 just ended July 28, and their numbers will be announced later).
• (and in principle, I won’t talk about anything Musk-related, including Tesla, the 7th kid on the Magnificent Seven block).

Kodak Alaris. From one PE firm to another. Kodak Alaris announced that Los Angeles-based Kingswood Capital Management acquired the company from the United Kingdom Pension Protection Fund.

Since there’s often confusion what “Kodak” is these days: Kodak Alaris consist of Kodak Moments, a global provider of photo products and services to retailers, consumers, and entertainment properties, and the Kodak Alaris Business Unit, which provides information capture and intelligent document processing solutions, including scanners.

Canva & Leonardo.Ai. Acquisition. Australia-based Canva acquires Australia-based Leonardo.Ai, a generative AI visual content and research startup with 120 employees, in a deal that is estimated to be north of $320M.

As Canva also promised when acquiring Affinity earlier this year and Kaleido in the past, the company intends to keep offering Leonardo’s existing tools and solutions.

Artifcts. Going Pro. The female founding team of Artifcts – which just joined the Mass Challenge Accelerator program and will demo their solution at Visual 1st – debuts Artifcts for Professionals (ARTIPro).

The ARTIPro platform offers a simple and secure process to onboard clients, assign team members, create client Artifcts, and ultimately transfer those Artifcts to clients for their ongoing exclusive access. Professionals in photo management, organizing, and moving industries will use ARTIPro to offer Artifcting services within their client packages.

Getty. Keep on pushin’ AI image generation. Getty launched updates to its Generative AI by Getty Images and Generative AI by iStock image generators, both based on the NVIDIA Edify model architecture.

This model can generate 4 images in 6 seconds, doubling the performance of the previous model, offers improved 4K upscaling, and “advanced camera controls,” which allows users to control photography-like settings such as depth of field and style.

Getty states that its model is exclusively trained on its own library (over 80M images), enabling it to provide indemnification for customers wanting to use AI images commercially.

Colossyan. A lesson or two in pivoting. Need inspiration on a too hot or too wet August day? Here’s today's LinkedIn post from Dominik Mate, Founder & CEO of Colossyan, Show & Tell demo presenters in our Visual 1st DIY Video track back in 2021:

My entrepreneurial journey so far:

𝟮𝟬𝟭𝟴: Deepfakes emerge, amplifying the problem of fake news

𝟮𝟬𝟭𝟴: Co-founded Defudger, a synthetic media detection service, with the goal of helping society

𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟬: Defudger failed. No one was willing to pay for our service

𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟬: Founded Colossyan, using what I learned from Defudger

𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟭: Raised a pre-seed investment round of $1M

𝗘𝗮𝗿𝗹𝘆 𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟮: Earned our first customer – someone who found us online and paid $800 for the poor product we had at the time (I couldn’t believe it)

𝗠𝗮𝘆 𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟮: Colossyan Creator publicly launched and we began commercializing

𝗙𝗲𝗯𝗿𝘂𝗮𝗿𝘆 𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟰: Raised a Series A investment of $22M

𝗧𝗼𝗱𝗮𝘆: Colossyan’s headcount sits at over 75, with offices in NYC, London, and Budapest

The main takeaway? Failure is only failure if you don’t pick yourself back up again.

Have an inspiring day,

Hans Hartman