CB Insights

Finserv 2025 trend: The cyborg wealth advisor Financial advisors are drowning in admin work, spending less than 20% of their time with clients. Leading wealth giants like Morgan Stanley are betting big on AI to transform their advisors into "cyborgs" — augmenting human capabilities with machine intelligence. The goal? Free up advisors to focus on what matters most: building client relationships. See the wealth tech partners making it happen: https://cbi.team/4iGouuH

AI drug discovery startups are gaining steam, reflected by: *A flood of funding dollars ($1.6B in 2024 so far) *Partnerships among all top 10 big pharma players *Rise in M&A exits Since Q1’23, there have been 10 M&A exits in the space, more than doubling its historical activity. And 8 of the 10 largest deals in the sector have happened since 2023. So which AI drug discovery startups will get scooped up next? We identify high-potential contenders in this report: https://cbi.team/3BA7RAe

Hot: Unstructured data M&A CRM giants are buying up AI startups that make sense of messy (aka unstructured) data. *This month, HubSpot scooped up Frame AI ($17M in funding), which turns customer conversations (like emails and calls) into insights and recommendations. *In September, Salesforce acquired ZoomIn to bolster its unstructured data management capabilities. Both companies are looking to help businesses marry their unstructured and structured customer data. Zooming out, the deals are part of a broader corporate M&A push to bring AI capabilities in house.

Analyzing NVIDIA's growth strategy: How does the chipmaker plan to usher in the next wave of AI? We uncovered 6 top strategic priorities highlighted by Nvidia’s recent acquisitions, investments, and partnerships (see graphic). Key takeaways: *Nvidia is leveraging its GPU-making expertise to advance AI infrastructure and applications. *The industrial sector represents a strong market opportunity for Nvidia. *The chipmaker is looking to bring AI together with next-gen tech, like quantum computing and 6G telecommunications.

The quantum moment: Quantum computers are years from large-scale commercialization. (Google is only at the second milestone of its 6-milestone quantum computing roadmap.) But expect commercial interest to rise quickly as quantum computers become more capable. *Investors are excited about the quantum landscape — equity funding hit nearly $1.5B across 100+ deals last year. *A diverse cohort of startups is also racing to commercialize the still-nascent tech. We mapped them out here: https://cbi.team/4gzLOIz

15 tech trends to watch in 2025 ⤵️

Quantum computing vs. classical computing (made easy) On Monday, Google debuted its latest quantum chip: Willow. Alphabet shares (Google’s parent) jumped 6% after the announcement. So what is quantum computing? Check out this graphic ⤵️

AI has become a unicorn factory. In 2024 so far, 44% of new unicorns have been AI companies. That represents over 7x growth in the last decade (from 6% in 2015). These AI players are reaching unicorn status far faster (median of 2 years) than non-AI companies (median of 9 years). The takeaway: AI capabilities are advancing at a rapid pace, from intelligent robotics to coding AI agents. Corporations that delay AI adoption risk falling behind their competitors.

All 1,249 unicorns. One market map. https://cbi.team/3Zwb7Vb

🌩 AI weather prediction = game-changing technology 🌩 Last week, Google’s DeepMind researchers unveiled a new generative AI model for 15-day weather forecasts that outperforms leading systems today. What you need to know: *AI weather and climate models are rapidly improving, enabling faster and more accurate predictions at lower computation costs than traditional physics-based models *These models use historical weather data to learn from weather patterns and generate future projections in minutes once trained *Researchers at Nvidia and Microsoft are also debuting new models The bottom line: Accurately predicting extreme weather in advance would unlock huge benefits, including protecting trillions of dollars worth of the global GDP. See why we picked AI weather prediction and 8 other technologies as game-changers here: https://cbi.team/4f3SFsM