This week the autonomous trucking world added another Unicorn. TuSimple raised a $95mm Series D round to expand its autonomous truck fleet to over 50 vehicles by June. Definitely a player to look out for in this area.
Other weekly news can be found below.
Company developments:
Waymo’s autonomous vehicles leave Apple in the dust – Feb. 15, 2019 (The Robot Report)
- The California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) this week released the disengagement reports for companies testing autonomous vehicles on public roads in California. The data, captured between Nov. 31, 2017 through Dec. 1, 2018, found that 48 companies reported driving 2 million miles in autonomous mode on California roads and highways
- According to the reported data, Waymo once again had the best-performing autonomous vehicles in California with one disengagement every 11,017 miles. That performance marks a 50 percent reduction in the rate and a 96 percent increase in the average miles traveled between disengagements compared to the 2017 numbers
Google open-sources PlaNet, an AI agent that learns about the world from images – Feb. 15, 2019 (VentureBeat)
- Google in collaboration with DeepMind today introduced the Deep Planning Network (PlaNet) agent, which learns a world model from image inputs and leverages it for planning. It’s able to solve a variety of image-based tasks with up to 5,000 percent the data efficiency, Google says, while maintaining competitiveness with advanced model-free agents
Xnor.ai Unveils First Battery-free, Solar AI Technology, Enabling a New Wave of Edge AI Computing – Feb. 13, 2019 (Business Wire)
- Xnor.ai (Xnor), the company that first proved it was possible to run state-of-the-art AI on resource constrained compute platforms, today unveiled its newest innovation – a standalone battery-free, solar-powered AI technology that will enable AI to run in an always-on mode on a range of edge devices
- Xnor’s solution, deployed on a hardware device roughly the size of a US quarter is able to intelligently detect visual objects, including people. This breakthrough machine learning and computer architecture approach reaches a greater power efficiency so that even state-of-the-art deep learning models, previously dependent on powerful GPUs, can be powered by a simple solar cell
Lightroom AI boosts image quality by 30 percent, Adobe says – Feb. 12, 2019 (CNET)
- After training an AI system on a billion photos, Adobe has reworked a fundamental part of digital photography for a 30 percent increase in image quality in its Lightroom software
- The improvement comes in new Lightroom releases Tuesday with an option called “enhance details” that can break past ordinary image-quality limits in areas with lots of fine details. It’ll take significant computing horsepower and benefit from a fast graphics chip, though, Adobe said
IBM opens Watson AI to public and private clouds – Feb. 12, 2019 (VentureBeat)
- IBM’s Watson artificial intelligence systems can now be used on Google Cloud Platform, AWS, Microsoft’s Azure, and other cloud providers through an integration with IBM Cloud Private for Data. The approach can also be used to bring Watson to private clouds or on-premise servers
- “What’s unique about what we’re doing — and I’m not sure if people will follow suit because I don’t think it’s their strategy — we are saying we are going to use open-source Kubernetes, enable portability,” Thomas said. “And for most of the public cloud providers, portability is not in their interest, so I think we’ll probably be unique in that stance.”
Bidgely Strengthens Leadership Position in Utility Artificial Intelligence With Electric Vehicle Disaggregation Patent – Feb. 12, 2019 (The Progress)
- Bidgely continues to expand its intellectual property portfolio with a new patent grant protecting its lucrative electric vehicle (EV) disaggregation technology, which has been successfully detecting EVs and charger type in the home for utilities since 2018
- This grant adds to the robust set of 14 patents protecting unique technology developments like load disaggregation from smart and non-smart meters, as well as solar PV disaggregation and appliance-level similar home comparisons. Bidgely’s core disaggregation technology powers its industry-first UtilityAI solutions, which extend from customer-facing to internal utility business functions and tackle use cases like distributed energy resource orchestration; electrification; customer engagement; and demand side and peak load management
California Real Estate Company Using AI to Increase Sustainability in Operations – Feb. 11, 2019 (Environmental Leader)
- The Swig Company recently announced it is using artificial intelligence (AI) to lower energy use and costs and streamlines sustainable building operations. The Swig Company, owner and operator of real estate assets across the county, partnered with Gridium, a tech company specializing in smart data analysis
- According to Gridium, building operators using its technology will not have to waste time scrolling through plots of BMS data to spot inefficient building drift. Machine learning algorithms automatically update based on the latest building meter and weather data, enabling Gridium software to perform load decompositions and to alert the operator if the lights or HVAC equipment were left running overnight
M&A:
Qloo acquires cultural recommendation service TasteDive – Feb. 13, 2019 (TechCrunch)
- The two companies sound pretty similar — according to the announcement, Qloo is “the leading artificial intelligence platform for culture and taste,” while TasteDive is “a cultural recommendation engine and social community.”
- What’s the difference? Well TasteDive is a website where you can create a profile, connect with other users and, as you like and dislike things, it will recommend music, movies, TV shows, books and more. Qloo, meanwhile, is trying to understand patterns in consumer taste and then sell that data to marketers
IQvia Acquires Linguamatics – Feb. 12, 2019 (Genome Web)
- Health analytics and contract research heavyweight IQvia has acquired bioinformatics company Linguamatics. Linguamatics describes itself on its website and in other marketing material — including at its booth at the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) conference here this week — as “an IQvia company.”
Datadog acquires app testing company Madumbo – Feb. 12, 2019 (TechCrunch)
- “We’re excited to have the Madumbo team join Datadog,” said Olivier Pomel, Datadog’s CEO. “They’ve built a sophisticated AI platform that can quickly determine if a web application is behaving correctly. We see their core technology strengthening our platform and extending into many new digital experience monitoring capabilities for our customers.”
- Paris-based Madumbo, which was incubated at Station F and launched in 2017, offers its users a way to test their web apps without having to write any additional code. It promises to let developers build tests by simply interacting with the site, using the Madumbo test recorder, and to help them build test emails, password and testing data on the fly
Fundraising / investment:
Logical Buildings Closes $3.5 Million Series C-1 Offering as SmartKit™ AI Smart Building Software Platform Expands Nationally – Feb. 19, 2019 (Alt Energy Mag)
- Logical Buildings, a software company that operates at the cutting edge of smart building and grid-edge energy management, has completed a $3.5 million Series C-1 offering as it continues to invest in further developing its SmartKit AI comprehensive building energy management platform, and expanding its adoption to new geographies
- The company’s SmartKit AI product growth is fueled by the convergence of energy grid decentralization, building systems’ digital transformation, and IoT device consumerization. The SmartKit AI mobile cloud platform synthesizes real-time smart meter utility and grid data with building mechanical and IoT sensor data to optimize building performance and improve property management decisions
Catapult Ventures launches with $55 million seed fund for AI startups – Feb. 14, 2019 (VentureBeat)
- Catapult Ventures is the brainchild of Rouz Jazayeri, a former Intel executive and more recently a partner at Kleiner Perkins; and Darren Liccardo, a former engineering executive at Tesla and drone company DJI. Jazayeri actually helped DJI, one of Kleiner Perkins’ portfolio companies, recruit Liccardo from Tesla, and from this the two began working together on a number of projects
- the fund is made up of money from myriad sources — corporations from across the automotive, aviation, chip, and IoT spheres; institutional investors; and family offices. Moreover, we now know that the fund’s goal is to target seed-stage and pre-seed-stage companies, and serve as the “first institutional, the most helpful, and the most influential investors,” according to a statement issued to VentureBeat
Sight Diagnostics raises $27.8 million to apply AI to blood tests – Feb. 14, 2019 (VentureBeat)
- Sight today announced that it has raised $27.8 million in series C financing led by Longliv Ventures, a division of multinational conglomerate CK Hutchison Group, and existing investors OurCrowd, Go Capital, and New Alliance Capital, along with strategic investors Jack Nicklaus II, a health care philanthropist; Steven Esrick; and an unnamed “major” medical equipment manufacturer. It brings Sight’s total capital raised to $52.8 million
- “After proving our technology in malaria detection, it became overwhelmingly clear to us that the CBC, the world’s most common blood test, is where we’d make the most impact,” Levy said. “The ability to create rich digital images of blood samples and analyze them in minutes has enormous potential to improve diagnostics and patient care. This funding round will also allow us to expand our R&D activities to develop applications beyond CBC.”
Peltarion raises $20M for its AI platform – Feb. 14, 2019 (TechCrunch)
- Peltarion, a Swedish startup founded by former execs from companies like Spotify, Skype, King, TrueCaller and Google, today announced that it has raised a $20 million Series A funding round led by Euclidean Capital, the family office for hedge fund billionaire James Simons. Previous investors FAM and EQT Ventures also participated, and this round brings the company’s total funding to $35 million
- There is obviously no dearth of AI platforms these days. Peltarion focus on what it calls “operational AI.” The service offers an end-to-end platform that lets you do everything from pre-processing your data to building models and putting them into production. All of this runs in the cloud and developers get access to a graphical user interface for building and testing their models. All of this, the company stresses, ensures that Peltarion’s users don’t have to deal with any of the low-level hardware or software and can instead focus on building their models
Autonomous truck startup TuSimple hits unicorn status in latest round – Feb. 13, 2019 (TechCrunch)
- TuSimple, a self-driving truck startup running daily routes for customers in Arizona, has raised $95 million in a Series D funding round led by Sina Corp. as the company prepares to scale up its commercial autonomous fleet to more than 50 trucks by June
- The startup, which launched in 2015 and has operations in San Diego and Tucson, Arizona, has a post-money valuation of $1.095 billion (aka unicorn status). TuSimple has raised $178 million to date in rounds that have included backers such as Nvidia and ZP Capital. Sina, operator of China’s biggest microblogging site Weibo, is one of TuSimple’s earliest investors. Composite Capital, a Hong Kong-based investment firm and previous investor, also participated in this latest round
AIStorm raises $13.2 million for AI edge computing chips – Feb. 11, 2019 (VentureBeat)
- AIStorm calls its tech “AI-in-Sensor” processing (AIS), and claims it has the potential to eliminate not only the power requirements and cost associated with traditional at-the-edge machine learning implementations, but also the latency
- To that end, AIStorm’s patented chip design is capable of 2.5 theoretical operations per second and 10 theoretical operations per second per watt, which Schie contends is 5 to 10 times lower than the average GPU-based system’s power draw. Moreover, through use of a technique called switched charge processing, which allows the chip to control the movement of electrons between storage elements, he says the chip is able to further boost efficiency by ingesting and processing data without first digitizing it
InReach Ventures, the ‘AI-powered’ European VC, closes new €53M fund – Feb. 11, 2019 (TechCrunch)
- InReach Ventures, the so-called “AI-powered” venture capital firm based in London, is announcing the first closing of a new €53 million fund targeting early-stage European technology companies — surpassing the original fund target of €50 million, apparently
- Founded by former Balderton Capital General Partner Roberto Bonanzinga, along with Ben Smith (former U.K. Engineering Director at Yammer) and John Mesrie (former General Counsel at Balderton Capital), InReach set out in 2015 to use technology to help scale VC, especially across Europe’s idiosyncratic and highly fragmented market
Partnerships:
Ford, VW reportedly near agreement on self-driving partnership – Feb. 15, 2019 (Auto Blog)
- A new report from Bloomberg suggests that Ford and Volkswagen are making progress on a potential partnership to jointly develop self-driving vehicles that could see VW invest in Argo AI, the autonomous vehicle startup in which Ford is a majority investor. The two sides reportedly discussed a valuation for Argo of around $4 billion
- Separately, The Detroit News reported this week that VW officials were due to visit Ford in Dearborn to continue discussions over autonomous and electric vehicles. The paper reports that VW has offered Audi’s wholly owned Autonomous Intelligent Driving subsidiary, called AID, as part of the negotiations
Cerebri AI Partners with Microsoft on Prescriptive Customer Analytics for Fortune 500 – Feb. 13, 2019 (PR Newswire)
- Cerebri AI, an enterprise software startup using proprietary artificial intelligence technology to generate next best actions that increase revenue and reduce operating costs, today announced the company has achieved “co-sell ready” status with Microsoft’s exclusive One Commercial Partner (OCP) program
- “Earning co-sell ready status with Microsoft is a tremendous opportunity for Cerebri AI as our Concurrent Advanced Reinforcement Learning software is a perfect pairing with Azure,” said Jean Belanger, Cerebri AI Co-founder & CEO. “We look forward to collaborating closely with the OCP team globally to bring even more value to their Fortune 500 accounts.”
Mozilla and Ubisoft partner on AI coding assistant Clever-Commit – Feb. 12, 2019 (VentureBeat)
- Ubisoft hopes to use the AI technology to release more, better quality features faster for its millions of game players. The company shared today that Clever-Commit already contributes to the development of major Ubisoft AAA titles — and the company is now working on integrating it into other brands
- Mozilla meanwhile hopes to give Firefox users even more stable versions of the browser. Clever-Commit will be integrated into the Firefox developer workflow, initially during the code review phase. If it works well, Mozilla wants to bring the tool into other stages of the code-writing process, especially during automation
Research / studies:
AI examines artery calcium deposits to assess heart disease risk – Feb. 15, 2019 (VentureBeat)
- A newly published paper on the preprint server Arxiv.org (“Direct Automatic Coronary Calcium Scoring in Cardiac and Chest CT“) proposes an artificially intelligent (AI) system that can evaluate and score CAC without human supervision. That’s not especially novel — automated CAC tests have been around for a while. However, the coauthors claim that their system is up to hundreds of times faster than state-of-the-art methods
AI system made in China spots childhood disease as well as or better than doctors – Feb. 12, 2019 (Japan Times)
- An artificial intelligence program developed in China that combs through test results, health records and even handwritten notes diagnosed childhood diseases as accurately as doctors, researchers said Monday
- To train the proof-of-concept system, Zhang and a team of 70 scientists injected more than 100 million data points from 1.3 million pediatrics patient visits at a major referral center in Guangzhou, China. The AI program diagnosed respiratory infections and sinusitis — a common sinus infection — with 95 percent accuracy.
Government / policy:
China is using facial recognition to track millions of Muslim citizens wherever they go – Feb. 17, 2019 (Quartz)
- A facial recognition company contracted by Chinese police has been monitoring the GPS coordinates of almost 2.6 million people in the locked-down region of Xinjiang, according to ZDNet. The area of northwestern China, home to 12 million Uyghur and other indigenous Muslims, has become one of the most heavily policed areas in the world, in what China says is a fight against Islamic radicalization and Uyghur separatist movements
Bill Clamps Down on “Racially Biased” Algorithms Used in Trials – Feb. 14, 2019 (Public News Service)
- A bipartisan measure in the Idaho Legislature aims to make the algorithms transparent and ban those that show bias. Civil rights groups, including the ACLU and NAACP, have raised concerns about discrimination in pretrial risk assessment algorithms, which analyze a person’s likelihood of not showing up for trial or committing another crime. Republican Rep. Greg Chaney of Caldwell says some of these programs have been shown to over-predict this likelihood with African-Americans
Pentagon outlines first artificial intelligence strategy as China and Russia chip away at U.S. tech edge – Feb. 13, 2019 (Japan Times)
- Outlined its first AI strategy in a report released Tuesday, the Pentagon called for accelerating the use of AI systems throughout the military, from intelligence-gathering operations to predicting maintenance problems in planes or ships. The report urges the U.S. to advance such technology swiftly before other countries chip away at its technological advantage
- “Other nations, particularly China and Russia, are making significant investments in AI for military purposes, including in applications that raise questions regarding international norms and human rights,” the report says
Federal Framework on Autonomous Vehicles Policy Essential, UPS Executive Says – Feb. 13, 2019 (Transport Topics)
- Nationwide policy for autonomous cars and trucks has the potential of facilitating the flow of freight while improving safety, according to a senior executive at UPS Inc. on Feb. 12
- At a panel hosted by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, Thomas Jensen, senior vice president of transportation policy at UPS, explained that the inevitable integration of autonomous vehicle technology across the freight industry will be enhanced when a national set of guidelines is implemented, and a patchwork in which states adhere to differing regulations is likely to hinder connectivity
Singapore trails only behind Netherlands in readiness for driverless cars: KPMG – Feb. 13, 2019 (Singapore Business)
- Singapore retained its second spot amongst 25 countries that have been actively rolling out initiatives in support of autonomous vehicles (AV), according to KPMG’s 2019 Autonomous Vehicles Readiness Index (AVRI)
- The index, which assessed countries on 25 different variables such as policy and registration, found that Singapore government is positioning the country as a global centre for AV development with the deployment of a simulated urban test-bed and plans for driverless buses amidst a stellar showing in the policy and legislation, and consumer acceptance categories, although it fell short of Netherlands in terms of infrastructure