Lightspeed Venture Partners Archives | Tech | Business | Economy https://techeconomy.ng/tag/lightspeed-venture-partners/ Tech | Business | Economy Tue, 14 Oct 2025 13:44:09 +0000 en-GB hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=7.0 https://techeconomy.ng/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/cropped-256Px-32x32.png Lightspeed Venture Partners Archives | Tech | Business | Economy https://techeconomy.ng/tag/lightspeed-venture-partners/ 32 32 Epiminds Launches with $6.6 Million to Build AI-Driven Marketing Teams https://techeconomy.ng/epiminds-launches-ai-marketing-teams/ https://techeconomy.ng/epiminds-launches-ai-marketing-teams/#respond Tue, 14 Oct 2025 13:44:09 +0000 https://techeconomy.ng/?p=169303 Its core system, Lucy, leads a team of AI agents capable of managing campaigns end-to-end, helping agencies boost performance, cut costs, and refocus on creativity.

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Epiminds, a Swedish startup founded by former Google and Spotify professionals, has launched with $6.6 million in funding to enhance how marketing teams operate in the artificial intelligence era.

The company, co-founded by Elias Malm and Mo Elkhidir, is developing multi-agent AI systems capable of running entire marketing operations, from campaign setup to optimisation and reporting. 

The seed round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with additional backing from EWOR, Entourage, and several high-profile angels, including the former CMO of Booking.com.

In only twelve weeks since its creation, Epiminds has already attracted top agencies managing more than 240 brands to its platform. The startup aims to tackle the inefficiencies affecting agencies today, slow decision-making, fragmented insights, and limited scalability, by introducing a self-learning AI workforce.

At the core of Epiminds’ technology is Lucy, an AI marketing manager designed to lead a team of over 20 specialised agents. This digital team handles all aspects of campaign management, including reporting, bidding, budget pacing, creative analysis, and more. 

Agencies can onboard clients in under 30 seconds and immediately gain access to a ready-made marketing team powered by AI.

Marketers are under more pressure than ever to do more with less,” said Mo Elkhidir, co-founder of Epiminds. “Lucy and her team take on the busywork so that marketing talent can do their best work. This is not about replacing creativity; it’s about giving it room to flourish.”

The idea for Epiminds was born out of the founders’ frustrations with inefficiencies in modern marketing. Malm, who previously worked at Google overseeing agency partnerships across the Nordics, saw creative teams stuck in repetitive operational work. 

Elkhidir, a Sudanese-born machine learning expert who led technical teams at Spotify and Kry, had long explored how AI agents could collaborate to solve complex tasks. 

Their vision came together after a project simulating Sweden’s 10.8 million citizens in AI, where they identified 23,400 simulated marketers, inspiring the concept of AI-powered marketing teams.

Early adopters are already seeing results. Agencies report quicker onboarding, improved performance, and reduced ad spend wastage. The system not only executes tasks but also learns from each agency’s operations, proactively detecting risks and providing actionable insights.

John Axelsson, founder and CEO of BBO, shared: “We’ve integrated EpiMinds into our advertising workflows. It has really started transforming how our specialists work by automating analysis and surfacing deep actionable insights, while we remain in control of strategic decisions. The result is faster optimisation, more effective collaboration between human expertise and AI, and ultimately better outcomes for our clients.”

Jenny Dettervik, media lead at Remotion, added: “EpiMinds has become a valuable part of our workflow. By automating parts of our agency’s know-how through AI agents, we can get insights faster, optimise more efficiently, and deliver higher quality to our clients.”

Lightspeed Partner Paul Murphy explained the firm’s investment rationale, saying: “As a former founder who relied heavily on performance marketing, I saw firsthand how difficult it is to scale campaigns across dozens of channels and geographies. 

“Epiminds’ multi-agent approach directly tackles that challenge, transforming the way agencies and brands operate. It’s rare to see a team build something this ambitious, and we believe Epiminds has the potential to redefine how marketing gets done in the AI era.”

Since joining EWOR’s accelerator programme, Epiminds has achieved commendable traction. Daniel Dippold, co-founder and CEO of EWOR, said: “Elias and Mo are the rare kind of founders that have what it takes to take a company from 0-1M ARR, from 1-100M, and from 100-infinity. They have both hustle and leadership, both speed and perfection, and both aggression and empathy. On both a rational and irrational level, I think and feel they will go far.”

Pieterjan Bouten, partner at Entourage, added: “Elias and Mo embody the urgency and operational excellence we look for in founders building in the AI era. A massive wave of innovation is reshaping how leading marketing agencies operate, and Epiminds is poised to be at the forefront of that transformation. We’re thrilled to back these two exceptional founders early as they pursue this massive opportunity.”

The company plans to expand Lucy’s features through increased integrations, improved autonomy, and advanced self-learning features. Each upgrade is designed to make the platform smarter and more efficient across all connected agencies.

Our vision is simple,” said Elias Malm. “We’re building Epiminds because we see where marketing is headed. The future is about dynamic, agentic teams that analyse, plan, execute, and improve in real time. Every marketer should have access to a 24/7 AI workforce that frees up their time for creativity and strategy. Our goal is to give them that future, today.”

Slug: Epiminds Launches with $6.6 Million to Power AI Marketing Teams
Meta Description: Swedish startup Epiminds, founded by ex-Google and Spotify professionals, launches with $6.6 million to build AI-driven marketing teams led by multi-agent system Lucy.

 

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Anthropic Nears $3.5 Billion Funding Deal, Unveils Claude 3.7 Sonnet https://techeconomy.ng/anthropic-nears-3-5b-funding-deal-unveils-claude-3-7-sonnet/ https://techeconomy.ng/anthropic-nears-3-5b-funding-deal-unveils-claude-3-7-sonnet/#respond Tue, 25 Feb 2025 08:33:44 +0000 https://techeconomy.ng/?p=153730 …that can “think” for as long as needed

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Anthropic, the artificial intelligence company behind the Claude chatbot, is set to raise $3.5 billion in its latest funding round, pushing its valuation to $61.5 billion. 

Initially aiming for $2 billion, the company has now secured greater backing from investors, including Lightspeed Venture Partners, General Catalyst, Bessemer Venture Partners, and Abu Dhabi-based MGX. 

This latest investment will bring Anthropic’s total funding to approximately $18 billion.

Even with its growing revenue, which now stands at around $1.2 billion annually, Anthropic is not yet profitable. The company plans to use the funds to further its AI research and development efforts, particularly in creating more advanced models.

Anthropic has also launched Claude 3.7 Sonnet, a new AI model that allows users to choose between instant responses and deeper, more complex reasoning. Unlike traditional AI chatbots that force users to pick between models with varying capabilities, Claude 3.7 Sonnet integrates both functionalities in a single system.

According to Anthropic, the model’s unique feature is its ability to “think” for as long as needed. This approach is just like human reasoning, where some questions require quick answers while others demand more thoughtful consideration. 

Similar to how humans don’t have two separate brains for questions that can be answered immediately versus those that require thought,” the company stated in a blog post, “we regard reasoning as simply one of the capabilities a frontier model should have, to be smoothly integrated with other capabilities, rather than something to be provided in a separate model.”

Pricing and Performance

The Claude 3.7 Sonnet model is priced at $3 per million input tokens and $15 per million output tokens, making it more expensive than some competitors, such as OpenAI’s o3-mini and DeepSeek’s R1. However, Anthropic says that its hybrid nature—combining standard chatbot functions with deep reasoning—justifies the cost.

Performance tests show Claude 3.7 Sonnet surpassing previous versions. On SWE-Bench, a benchmark for real-world coding tasks, it achieved an accuracy of 62.3%, outperforming OpenAI’s o3-mini model, which scored 49.3%. 

Another test, TAU-Bench, measured AI interaction with users in a simulated retail environment, where Claude 3.7 Sonnet scored 81.2%, ahead of OpenAI’s o1 model at 73.5%.

Again, Anthropic claims to have greatly improved the model’s ability to distinguish between harmful and harmless prompts, reducing unnecessary refusals by 45% compared to its predecessor, Claude 3.5 Sonnet.

Alongside Claude 3.7 Sonnet, Anthropic is launching a research preview of Claude Code, an AI-powered coding assistant. This tool allows developers to execute tasks directly from their terminal, such as modifying codebases, debugging errors, and even pushing updates to GitHub.

Illustrating its abilities, an Anthropic representative showed how Claude Code could break down a project’s structure and suggest improvements using plain English commands. Initially, access to Claude Code will be limited and granted on a first-come, first-served basis.

While Anthropic has taken a measured, safety-focused approach in the past, this launch seems to be a more aggressive innovation. However, OpenAI is reportedly preparing to release its own hybrid AI model in the coming months, bringing even fiercer competition in the space.

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