The company name is aislop in reverse. Because it reads like parody, it is likely parody. It would be sad if smart people on Hacker News fall for this, not to mention AI hating journalists and bloggers.
But let's give the VCs of the round the benefit of doubt, and hope the raise is tied to KPIs and long term value creation.
Is it possible that VC decision makers just don't care to much at the moment? Do they have big incentives to have "Invested in 37 AI companies" on their power point slides or something similar?
Will somebody ask question about 10 Million spent later on? Would be curious how that works. My guess would be that only the overall result counts, so if you happen to increase the 1 billion (by whatever metric used) enough, nobody will care about "some dozen millions" spent on some non performing companies.
Maybe that's totally wrong. At least I know a guy working at internal revision at a bank and 1 Million missing from the books is a big deal there.
I do realize that the head line is misleading and nobody spent millions on this particular company. From what I have heard over the years such things do happen, though.
But let's give the VCs of the round the benefit of doubt, and hope the raise is tied to KPIs and long term value creation.