Welcome back, my friends! This month’s roundup of SaaS, AI, and SaaSBoomi insights: the triple play that’s driving the Nvidia surge, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s view of the future of computing, a loss of face for Google, and more.
SaaSBoomi Annual 2024 is here at last
First, a shoutout on SaaSBoomi Annual 2024 coming up in Chennai on March 7-8. Registration is closed as we got oversubscribed again despite nearly doubling our capacity from last year. And if you’re all set to go, track the agenda, and make your plans. See you in India’s SaaS capital!
Nvidia’s triple play
Since the start of last year, Nvidia’s share price has surged by nearly 500% for a market capitalization of around $2 trillion, making it the third most valuable company behind Microsoft and Apple. Its parallel-processing GPUs, initially designed for the fast computing needed for video games, turned out to be ideal for training AI models. Hence the surge. Amazon, Alphabet, AMD and others are now jumping into the AI chipmaking game. But, as The Economist explains, Nvidia’s dominance comes not just from its chips, but also its networking kit and software. That triple play is hard to beat.
We don’t need no coding
Pink Floyd’s lyrics may need an update after Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang advised kids not to waste their time learning to code. “Everybody in the world is now a programmer. This is the miracle of artificial intelligence,” he said at an event in Dubai. As generative AI enables computers to comprehend natural language inputs, coding languages like Java will become obsolete, according to Huang.
For a deep dive into Huang’s view of the future, read the new Wired interview with him, where he says, “We looked at the way Moore’s law was formulated, and we said, ‘Don’t be limited by that. Moore’s law is not a limiter to computing.’”
Meanwhile, ServiceNow, Hugging Face, and Nvidia released new open-access LLMs to help developers tap GenAI for building enterprise applications. StarCoder2 has been trained on 600+ programming languages for code generation.
Le Chat is French answer to ChatGPT
French startup Mistral has unveiled a new LLM that is smaller than OpenAI’s GPT-4 in number of parameters but on par in important aspects of performance, such as reasoning. Mistral also announced a deal with Microsoft which is already in a deep partnership with OpenAI. Microsoft will take a stake in Mistral and make its models available on the Azure cloud.
Where VCs are looking
A Pitchbook analysis shows that three emerging areas – AI data centers, local LLMs, and domain-specific foundation models – will gain the most from Nvidia’s momentum as a primary driver of the AI market. These are the growth catalysts that VCs are looking at.
Google loses face
Google’s rollout of its new chatbot Gemini and the open-source LLM Gemma had boosted the AI pioneer’s image in February, only to have it come crashing down. Soon after its launch, Google paused an image generation feature in Gemini, following a right-wing backlash on X. Critics claimed a bias against White people.
Meanwhile, Toronto-based startup Ideogram, led by former Google employees who helped create the first version of the tech giant’s image generation software, announced series A funding of $80 million.
Snowflake stock falls
Snowflake shares plunged by over 20% after it announced that billionaire CEO Frank Slootman, who took the company public in 2020, will be replaced by former Google executive Sridhar Ramaswamy, who was the company’s VP of AI. The cloud data company’s projected revenue for the current quarter fell below Wall Street estimates.
SaaS is coming for the 99%
Julien Codorniou, an investor who earlier worked at Microsoft and Facebook, points out that the SaaS revolution has mostly been for white-collar workers. Codorniou pioneered Workplace at Facebook, the company’s first SaaS venture. There he stumbled upon the untapped frontline tech market, amassing users from organizations like Starbucks and Walmart. Now he sees “an opportunity for savvy software entrepreneurs to build the Salesforce of the frontline workers’ world,” as detailed in this article.
Recap of our Gulf foray with Qafila
Qafila means a group of herding families in Arabic. It’s our latest initiative to help startups from India find their way in the unique business landscape of the Gulf. In typical SaaSBoomi style, we came up with a playbook, and then took it further with a three-day event in Dubai. Veris co-founder Aastha Sharma, one of the leading lights of this initiative, has penned a recap of what transpired at Qafila.
Storytelling for a pitch deck
How do you combine essential information with an engaging story in your startup’s pitch deck for investors? Few know it better than Girish Mathrubootham, founder and CEO of Freshworks. In a videocast alongside Shekhar Kirani, partner at Accel, he deconstructs Freshworks’ first pitch deck which helped secure the initial round of funding from Accel. We curated this from SeedToScale.
And that’s a wrap for this month. Subscribe to the MRR newsletter for curated content that will give you food for thought on your SaaS business and all the latest SaaSBoomi content. Already a subscriber? Please forward it to other founders who may find it useful.
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