Big raise for Israel's Quantum Machines

Top News

• Quantum Machines raises $170M: The Israeli startup’s Series C round was led by PSG Equity, with contributions from Intel, Red Dot Capital Partners, and some prior investors. It’s one of the biggest raises by any quantum computing company we’ve yet seen, because Quantum Machines is already a major international player in their field. More than half of all companies in the world using quantum computers are working with their technology.

• Quora’s Poe intros AI-generated apps: Poe’s new App Creator Tool allows users to generate a new app based on a simple text description, including basic specs and the AI models on which they want the app to rely. (For example, OpenAI’s o3-mini or Google’s Veo 2.) The tool is powered by Anthropic’s Claude 3.7 Sonnet model. Poe Apps can run as a pure visual or alongside a chatbot window; the code allows for manual adjustments and tweaks as well.

• Microsoft mulling “free with ads” Office suite: A number of online sources are reporting that Microsoft is quietly testing a free, ad-supported version of Microsoft Office for Windows. Users could access PowerPoint, Word, Excel, and other classic apps for free, so long as they’re willing to tolerate a persistent banner ad along the side of their screen and occasional 15-second commercial interruptions.

TWiST500

It’s a huge day for one TWiST500 company in particular! Bloomberg reports that Anthropic is nearing a new deal for $3.5 billion in fresh funding, which is even more than the LLM company set out to raise. The round, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, was originally targeted at $2 billion, and is now apparently over-subscribed. The report lists Menlo Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners, General Catalyst, MGX, and others as all expressing strong interest.

Those are obviously huge numbers, but it’s not entirely surprising that there’s massive investor interest in Anthropic these days. Earlier this week, the company introduced its latest Claude 3.7 Sonnet hybrid reasoning model, which can quickly solve complex problems using a variety of methods and approaches. Not just that, Claude can give users a look behind-the-curtain and display a step-by-step guide to how it arrived at its conclusions.

Paying subscribers also get access to “extended thinking mode,” which allows Claude to pause for a moment of self-reflection (yeah, for real!) before answering. Anthropic suggests this improves its performance on more taxing subjects, like math, physics, coding, and Pokémon. - Lon

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