Twenty-two-year-old Alisa Wu walked into her fundraising meetings as a solo founder armed with a strong idea, but no co-founder and no employees.
“ChatGPT is my CTO,” she told Capital Brief, explaining how she’s building Lucent to solve one of AI’s most pressing bottlenecks: training data. Thirty-six hours after starting her raise, Wu had secured a pre-seed round of $2 million from Long Journey Ventures, Horizon VC and Weekend Fund.
The lightning-fast fundraise could be seen as another signal of the ongoing mania sweeping through investment markets for all things AI — one that has spurred speculation of a bubble fit to burst.
For her part, Wu agrees AI companies are getting funded more easily than non-AI companies, but she believes the returns will justify the investment and doesn’t see it as “too big of a bubble”.
