Jasper, a service that leverages AI to generate marketing art and copy, raised $125M led by Insight Partners at a $1.7B valuation (Kyle Wiggers/TechCrunch)

Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch:
Cloud storage startup Wasabi, which competes with AWS’ S3, raised a $250M Series D, or $125M equity, led by L2 Point, and $125M debt, at a $1.1B+ valuation  —  The cloud services sector is still dominated by Amazon and the other so-called “hyperscalers” — e.g. the Microsoft Azures, Google Cloud Platforms and IBM Clouds of the world.

TechCrunch:
A look at Unstable Diffusion, which is trying to monetize AI porn generators; the group migrated from a subreddit to Discord, where it has over 45,000 members  —  Of course, it’s an ethical minefield  —  When Stable Diffusion, the text-to-image AI developed by startup Stability AI …

Melissa Heikkilä / MIT Technology Review:
Artists say they risk losing income as people use their names as distinctive style prompts in text-to-image AI art generators for commercial purposes  —  Greg Rutkowski is a more popular prompt than Picasso.  —  Those cool AI-generated images you’ve seen across the internet?

Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch:
RisingWave Labs, which is developing a data stream processing service, raised a $36M Series A led by Yunqi Partners, bringing its total funding to $40M+  —  RisingWave Labs, a company developing a platform for data stream processing, today announced that it raised $36 million in a Series …

Peter Grant / Wall Street Journal:
VTS, which provides online tools to landlords for managing leases and tenant data, raised a $125M+ Series E led by CBRE Group, sources say at a $1.7B valuation  —  Latest funding round increases startup’s valuation to about $1.7 billion  —  VTS, one of the fastest-growing real-estate technology firms …

Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch:
Israel-based NeuReality, which is developing cost-effective AI inferencing chips and software, raised a $35M Series A led by Samsung Ventures and others  —  The growing demand for AI, particularly generative AI (i.e., AI that generates images, text and more), is supercharging the AI inferencing chip market.