AI to spot defects in sewer pipes now?

Making Sewers Smarter, One Pipe at a Time 🛠️

Powerful LinkedIn automation software to run large-scale outreach campaigns to close more deals

Automate numerous LinkedIn accounts, reach thousands of leads weekly, one integrated inbox. Built for large-scale outreach for lead gen agencies & sales teams with Aimfox

Startup Spotlight

SewerAI, founded by Matthew Rosenthal and Billy Gilmartin, uses AI to modernize sewer inspections, tackling the growing infrastructure challenges exacerbated by climate change. Their cloud-based tools like Pioneer and AutoCode streamline data management and defect tagging, enhancing efficiency for municipalities and contractors. With $25 million raised, including $15 million in recent funding, SewerAI aims to expand its AI capabilities and market reach, offering solutions to proactively manage sewer systems and reduce costs associated with maintenance and emergencies.

OpenAI has brought on Sarah Friar, former Nextdoor CEO, as their first CFO, and Kevin Weil, a veteran of Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, as Chief Product Officer. These hires come after co-founder Ilya Sutskever's departure and Jakub Pachocki's promotion to Chief Scientist. Sam Altman, OpenAI's CEO, believes Sarah and Kevin will help drive the next phase of growth. The company has also recently added new directors, including Sue Desmond-Hellmann and Nicole Seligman.

Elon Musk is working on transforming X into a super-app like China's WeChat, integrating social networking, messaging, news, shopping, and banking. Central to this vision is a payments feature, allowing users to store and transfer money. X has already obtained payments licenses in 28 states and plans to expand internationally. Musk aims to offer high yields on balances to encourage usage. The big challenge? Convincing everyone that X is now also a bank.

Notion just launched Notion Sites, taking their page publishing to the next level. Users can now customize favicons, build navigation bars, use breadcrumb navigation, and publish under custom domains. There are also basic SEO features, Google Analytics integration, and social media share preview customization. While detailed customization isn't available yet, more visual theming options are on the way. Notion aims to make it the simplest way to publish beautiful websites. AI features might also be coming soon.

The music industry is suing AI music generators Suno and Udio for copyright infringement, claiming they illegally trained their models on popular songs. Universal, Warner, and Sony are behind the lawsuits, seeking damages up to $150,000 per song. The labels allege that the AI can generate music strikingly similar to tracks by artists like ABBA, Jason Derulo, and Mariah Carey. Suno and Udio haven’t commented yet, but their CEOs argue their tech creates original music, not copies. This legal battle highlights the tension between AI innovation and copyright laws.

Startup Acquisitions

Mozilla Acquires Anonym (LINK)

Data analytics startup Ayudante acquires SG firm (LINK)

Shopify acquires Threads (no, not that one) (LINK)

Hugging Face to Acquire Argilla for $10M (LINK)

Filing shows Salesforce paid $419M to buy Spiff in February. (LINK)

🚀 David Park grew his business from $0 to $3M in annual recurring revenue in 18 months.

⬆️ Discover what this SaaS learned on their journey to $10,000 MRR

💰 Wizsuby made $250 in 2 days on Twitter without any budget by leveraging effective monetization strategies.

🛣️ Guerilla Marketing: How To Scrape Apollo leads for COMPLETELY free in 2024

⚙️ How a startup grew from $600K to $1.4M annually with fewer features than competitors

Ok that’s it for this week, We keep refining our newsletter content, just hit reply to let us know what you think about this issue.