Beyond the Mainframe Nº3 | Laika Ventures
2025, the year of AI agents 🫣
Welcome to Laika Ventures’ monthly newsletter! We promise to bring you the most relevant news on AI, fire 🔥 discussions, and more.
We all know trying to stay updated on what’s happening in AI can be difficult with so much going on, and this month’s newsletter is packed with news, lots of updates in different industries and political discussions. Exciting things happened this month: we bring you news in Europe, AI policy in the USA, NVIDIA’s CEO Keynote, and the opinion of Humberto Ayres Pereira regarding Europe’s AI positioning.
Let’s go!
Project Europe Announcement 🇪🇺
One of the most talked movements in Europe during this month was celebrating European innovation, which started with Project Europe. Frustrated by other countries’ dominance in innovation, Europeans launched Project Europe to “change the narrative”. The goal is to invest €200,000 in 10-20 founders per year, and being supported by 150+ European founders (Klarna, Mistral AI, Datadog and more).
While the movement for innovation is happening, exciting (or late) news for Meta users in Europe who will be able to test Meta AI in a few weeks - “It’s taken longer than we would have liked to get our AI technology into the hands of people in Europe as we continue to navigate its complex regulatory system – but we’re glad we’re finally here”.
USA AI Action Plan 🇺🇸
A few weeks ago, the White House requested public input towards the AI Action Plan that could be submitted until March 15, 2025.
OpenAI shared their proposal to free AI companies from some regulations that could threaten the USA’s position in innovation, comparing to the “number of strategic advantages” in CCP-controlled (Chinese Communist Party) China.
But this proposal, alongside Google’s proposal, was not so well seen by the public as closed-source models have been criticized and as copyright battles related to OpenAI are ongoing. In fact, more than 400 Hollywood names signed an open letter urging the administration to not roll back copyright protections. The letter says Google and OpenAI “are arguing for a special government exemption so they can freely exploit America’s creative and knowledge industries, despite their substantial revenues and available funds. There is no reason to weaken or eliminate the copyright protections that have helped America flourish”.
AI Phones ☎️
From Apple to Honor to Telekom and Perplexity, we had a lot of breakthroughs in AI-powered assistants in our phones.
Deutsche Telekom (parent company of T-Mobile US - a major American wireless network operator), announced the development of an "AI Phone" in partnership with Perplexity.
Samsung rolls out One UI 7 with AI features, reinforcing its position against competitors like Apple. If you have a Galaxy S24, S23 or any other that will receive this update, you’ll be able to test their assistant.
Chinese smartphone giant Honor will invest more than 10 billion US dollars over the next five years to “co-create a new paradigm for AI ecosystem”.
The year of AI agents ⚡
With many startups focusing on “Agentic AI”, as NVIDIA's CEO, Jensen Huang, puts it, here are some updates that happened this month and are worth mentioning.
Another Chinese startup joins the AGI race. Manus introduced its general AI agent - “It’s a truly autonomous agent that bridges the gap between conception and execution. (…) potentially a glimpse into AGI”.
After the hype generated by Manus, OpenAI shares new tools for developers and enterprises to build agents that deliver real-world utility.
More companies are building their agents, Zoom being one of them, since repositioning as an “AI-first work platform for human connection” last year. This month, Zoom shared with the world the new agentic AI skills and agents for Zoom AI Companion.
Browser Use, which makes websites accessible for AI agents by extracting all interactive elements, raised a seed round of $17 million led by Felicis Ventures, with participation from A Capital, Nexus Ventures, Y Combinator, Paul Graham, Liquid2, SV Angel, Pioneer Fund, and others. This new funding round is proving the belief that AI agents will be the future, and Browser Use is selling the “pickaxe”.
NVIDIA’s new updates ⛳
This month happened the Nvidia’s GTC (GPU Technology Conference) 2025 conference where they announced updates that make one believe AI is not slowing down, specially with the Blackwell Ultra (release date second half 2025) and Vera Rubin AI (release date late 2026) chips announcement, that expect to enable faster and more efficient AI.
From robots, autonomous vehicles and more releases.
What’s happening with the big players 👀
This month we had new funding rounds, big investments, new models, robots and cars. So, the usual.
Anthropic raises Series E led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. They raised $3.5billion at a $61.5billion post-money valuation.
Open AI launched NextGenAI, a consortium with 15 research institutions (including Harvard, MIT, and Oxford) and is committing $50million in research grants, compute funding and API access.
Google unveiled Gemma 3, which is a lightweight AI model that can deliver the same performance as other large models from competitors but running on only one GPU.
Google’s Gemini with personalization aims to bring a more contextualized responses by using your Google apps, starting with your Search history.
“We’ll only use your Search history when our advanced reasoning models determine that it’s actually helpful”, Dave Citron, from Gemini’s team shared.
Perplexity published announced its proposal to acquire TikTok as the ban deadline is April 5. From being an AI search startup to developing its own models, partnering on an AI phone, building an AI browser, Perplexity has been evolving their strategy.
BMW Group and Alibaba Group announced a partnership in China to accelerate the AI-driven mobility, by integrating Alibaba’s Qwen large language model (LLM) into BMW’s next-generation intelligent vehicles- the Neue Klasse models.
Funny Updates 😆
Everything Ghibli Style! 🎨 Last week, you probably woke up to everyone sharing ghibli style images created using ChatGPT new AI image generator. Sam also shared on X that they would limit the use image generation to free users since their “GPUs are melting”.
The Roots of Europeans’ Frustration
Europe’s AI struggle isn’t new. We’re a continent rich in academic excellence and we have a super strong, educated middle class that can double as builders and clients. The problem is that the commercialization and adoption of technology at scale is weak.
As an entrepreneur, I strongly believe that the only practical problem we have is one of excess Bureaucracy, which stems from a disbelief in the SMBs and entrepreneurs. With bureaucracy we get fragmented markets, organizational overhead, costs and loss opportunities. Bureaucracy is regressive, that is, it affects smaller and poorer companies who can’t spend on lawyers and consultants to navigate red tape. So we entrepreneurs know that this complexity is putting us at a stupid disadvantage vs. the old incumbent players. This creates disbelief. Then, it is the disbelief that generates a brain drain toward U.S. tech giants and U.S. startups. European entrepreneurs do great in the US.
As an example, just last week we at Rows received a mandatory Survey about Research & Development done at our Company. The survey is fine to a degree but then at the end it asks for a list of every employee, allocation to research etc. It’s absurd. That is just one of many, many examples. So yes, the frustration is real.
And this frustration contaminates the most important part of a company: selling valuable products and services to relevant customers. When we manage red tape we stop pursuing deals, we’re telling our teams and investors “yes, this paperwork matters”. (It shouldn’t matter).
-Humberto Ayres Pereira, co-founder and CEO at Rows.com
Read the full article in our blog.
We’re a portuguese company based in Braga, and we’re all about celebrating 🇵🇹 portuguese innovations!
Framedrop, an AI startup in the media industry, is hiring! Check the open roles here.
If you’re in Lisbon, we hope you didn’t miss the AI meetup.
Sword Health is expanding their AI & Algorithms team. Join here to help them free the 2 billion people who live in pain.
There are open job positions at our portfolio companies. Check it out here.
BPI is organizing an “AI Innovation Garden” in Porto starting 9th of April, free to all ages. Check it here: https://www.bancobpi.pt/particulares/porto-recebe-bpi-ai-innovation-garden
→ If you’re doing amazing things in Portugal and we didn’t highlight it, let us know! We keep our eyes wide open but sometimes we can miss something 😉
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