500 Global

We are coming to GITEX Africa! 🙌 Join Africa’s Business Heroes, in collaboration with 500 Global, for a high-impact workshop designed for founders building and scaling in Africa. If you are raising capital or refining your story, this session is for you. Come for a deep dive on how to pitch to an audience of global investors Come learn from Demola Adegbite on what it takes to build in Africa And stay for practical insights, honest conversations, and actionable takeaways WHEN: Tuesday, April 7th TIME: 10:30 AM – 12:30 PM (Moroccan time) WHERE: GITEX Africa, Workshop Room, Hall 14 (next to the Infrastructure Stage) Sign up here: https://lnkd.in/dRR-mhkj We look forward to seeing you there. Zahra Baitie-Boateng Reda LAKHLIFI Demola Adegbite Carrie Liauw Lucia Perttula

Debt markets are becoming one of the most compelling frontiers for applied AI. 9fin’s $170M Series C raise underscores just how much opportunity there is to modernize the credit ecosystem with better data, faster analysis, and more intelligent workflows. The company plans to use the funding to accelerate product development, expand internationally, and further invest in their AI and data platform. As one of the largest yet most complex financial markets, debt has historically been difficult to navigate at speed, but deep, domain-specific systems like 9fin's will unlock value in industries long overdue for a change. Congratulations Steven Hunter, Huss E. and the 9fin team for this achievement! Read the full story here: https://lnkd.in/gHvAED8J Christine Tsai | Tony Wang | Vishal Harnal | Atika French | Ally Boffa-Taylor | Iris Sun | Leonard Lee

Morocco recorded 30× growth in venture capital over six years. Demola Adegbite, Partner, Africa at 500 Global, maps what's driving that momentum and what it means for founders building in the region. We've seen similar patterns emerge in Southeast Asia, Latin America, across the Middle East and now Africa: a convergence of policy momentum, rising founder quality, and a consumer base ready to skip legacy infrastructure entirely. Today, we see that same convergence in Morocco.  We don't make this call lightly. Read the full Bridge Economy thesis: https://lnkd.in/eScaibDF Are you building in Morocco? We want to connect: https://lnkd.in/eh5JmeEd Carrie Liauw | Lucia Perttula | Reda LAKHLIFI

There's a gap between proving laser comms works and proving it can scale. IEEE Spectrum featured Transcelestial because we're closing it. The article is clear about what sets us apart: While others have demonstrated laser links using bespoke, multi-million-dollar equipment, we're the only company approaching this through manufacturability, supply chain, and ground station networks built to make commercial sense. That's the unlock the industry has been waiting for. 🔓 High-bandwidth. Secure. Optical connectivity from orbit... at a cost structure that can actually scale. Decades from now, when fiber-speed internet reaches the parts of the world still waiting for it, the story might just trace back to a rooftop like ours. 40 satellites. Fiber-grade connectivity across the equatorial band. A cost-per-bit that rewrites the economics of space communications. The bottleneck was never the physics. It was how you bring it to people. IEEE Spectrum's full story by Tereza Pultarova: https://lnkd.in/gNSf2JRA #LaserCommunications #Transcelestial #SpaceTech

Every investor I speak with is asking the same question right now: how can I tell if what I'm looking at is a genuine business — or just a temporary gap that AI will fill in six months? It's not a simple question. AI is disrupting both incumbents and startups, shrinking the time between innovation and commoditization, and making traditional methods for judging defensibility seem outdated. What seemed to be a strong moat 18 months ago can now turn into just a commodity feature. This June, I will lead two case studies at 500 Global VC Unlocked: AI Edition to address this key question — teaching investors how to navigate AI platform shifts to make smarter, more resilient investment decisions. I can't promise to answer the question fully, but I will certainly try to bring some clarity amid all this uncertainty. VC Unlocked #venturecapital

There is a lot going on in this picture, so let me try to unpack it! 🧵👇 First, we are at 500 Global, one of the heavyweights in the region actively investing in the future. A massive shoutout to Khailee Ng and team for constantly supporting local entrepreneurs through their AI residency initiative. It’s a brilliant weekly get-together where the community can just come, build, and present. I have been lucky enough to attend multiple sessions, and I walk away learning something new every single time. Then we have 🚀 André Teow from Build for AI. His passion for the developer community is absolutely infectious. They are doing the crucial grassroots work hosting hackathons, driving experimentation, and giving builders the actual space and resources they need to turn wild AI concepts into tangible products. They run massive scale events too, which I’ve been thrilled to be a part of in different capacities. Next to him is Khalil Nooh from Mesolitica. What he and his team are building is vital for our ecosystem. They are pushing the boundaries of localized AI and open-source models, ensuring that our regional languages and contexts are represented at the cutting edge of machine learning. And you can't miss the Supabase t-shirt! It perfectly tells the scale story, a great reminder that through different motions across the startup and tech ecosystem, we are all interconnected. They say a picture is worth a thousand words and I don't have the character limit to go that far though I sure can :) but to summarize building the future of AI takes a village, and this is what that village looks like. 🚀 #500Global #ArtificialIntelligence #Startups #VentureCapital #BuildForAI #Mesolitica #Supabase #TechCommunity #Founders #Hackathons #Scale

The AI Scientist: Towards Fully Automated AI Research, Now Published in Nature Magazine Nature: https://lnkd.in/gs5zH7r5 Blog: https://lnkd.in/ghpsM2U7 When we first introduced The AI Scientist, we shared an ambitious vision of an agent powered by foundation models capable of executing the entire machine learning research lifecycle. From inventing ideas and writing code to executing experiments and drafting the manuscript, the system demonstrated that end-to-end automation of the scientific process is possible. Soon after, we shared a historic update: the improved AI Scientist-v2 produced the first fully AI-generated paper to pass a rigorous human peer-review process. Today, we are happy to announce that “The AI Scientist: Towards Fully Automated AI Research,” our paper describing all of this work, along with fresh new insights, has been published in Nature Magazine! This Nature publication consolidates these milestones and details the underlying foundation model orchestration. It also introduces our Automated Reviewer, which matches human review judgments and actually exceeds standard inter-human agreement. Crucially, by using this reviewer to grade papers generated by different foundation models, we discovered a clear scaling law of science. As the underlying foundation models improve, the quality of the generated scientific papers increases correspondingly. This implies that as compute costs decrease and model capabilities continue to exponentially increase, future versions of The AI Scientist will be substantially more capable. Building upon our previous open-source releases (https://lnkd.in/gCwAS4KA), this open-access Nature publication comprehensively details our system's architecture, outlines several new scaling results, and discusses the promise and challenges of AI-generated science. This substantial milestone is the result of a close and fruitful collaboration between researchers at Sakana AI, the University of British Columbia (UBC) and the Vector Institute, and the University of Oxford. Congrats to the team!