Most of us could infer that large scale autonomous vehicle programs are capital intensive. With that being said, the recent news of Uber’s $20 million a month burn rate for its autonomous vehicle program must have caught a lot of us by surprise. With that amount of money they might as well pursue 1 or 2 acquisitions to help accelerate progress. Other weekly news can be found below.
Company developments:
Ford is expanding its self-driving vehicle program to Austin – Mar. 13, 2019 (TechCrunch)
- “We are on track to announce the next deployment city in which we plan to expand our self-driving technology and business testing efforts by the end of this year. We will provide more details at the appropriate time,” a Ford spokesperson said in an emailed statement
- Ford is a bit different from other companies that have launched autonomous vehicle pilots in the United States. The automaker is pursuing two parallels tracks that will eventually combine ahead of its commercial launch in 2021. The automaker is testing and honing in on what its AV business model might look like, while separately developing autonomous vehicle technology
Uber’s self-driving car unit was burning $20 million a month – Mar. 12, 2019 (TechCrunch)
- The figures, dating back to 2016, paint a picture of a company desperate to meet over-ambitious autonomy targets and one that is willing to spend freely, even recklessly, to get there. As Uber prepares for its IPO later this year, the new details could prove an embarrassing reminder that the company is still trailing in its efforts to develop technology that founder Travis Kalanick called “existential” to Uber’s future
- The report was written for Uber as part of last year’s patent and trade secret theft lawsuit with rival Waymo, which accused engineer Anthony Levandowski of taking technical secrets with him when he left Google to found self-driving truck startup Otto. Uber acquired Otto in 2016. Uber hired Walter Bratic, the author of the report, as an expert witness to question Waymo’s valuation of the economic damages it had suffered — a whopping $1.85 billion. Bratic’s report capped at $605,000 the cost to independently develop Waymo’s purported trade secrets
Energy Toolbase Integrates Stem’s Industry-Leading AI Storage Platform and Experience – Mar. 12, 2019 (PR Newswire)
- Energy Toolbase now includes Stem, Inc., the world leader in Artificial Intelligence (AI)-driven energy storage services. This addition gives project developers who use Energy Toolbase the opportunity to design and deploy solar + storage solutions based on Stem’s industry-leading energy storage controls. With this integration, distributed energy providers can simulate project performance, analyze financial returns, and develop sales proposals informed by Stem’s Athena AI platform and rich operating experience
Microsoft launches AI Business School – Mar. 11, 2019 (VentureBeat)
- The Microsoft AI Business School is born out of three years of conversations with customers and follows the launch of an AI school for developers and AI School first introduced last year
- The AI Business School follows the lead of similar instructional guides, such as the AI Transformation Playbook from Andrew Ng. Unlike others, AI Business School material draws on three years of conversations with customers implementing AI, as well as lessons learned from AI solutions Microsoft introduced internally, Microsoft vice president of AI marketing and productization Mitra Azizirad told VentureBeat in a phone interview
M&A:
NVIDIA to buy supercomputer chipmaker Mellanox for $6.9B, beating out Intel and Microsoft – Mar. 11, 2019 (TechCrunch)
- After several days of speculation, today NVIDIA confirmed that it would acquire chipmaker Mellanox for $6.9 billion, paying $125 per share in cash, in an ongoing consolidation of chipmakers — and in this case those making chips for supercomputers, a crucial market segment in this age of cloud services
- The news caps off what the media had reported as a bidding war between NVIDIA, Intel and Microsoft for the company now based out of San Jose but originally founded in Israel. Interestingly, this final price is lower than what had been reported as the final offering price. First, there were reports that Microsoft was interested in the company. Then Intel came into the picture, looking to buy it for around $6 billion, reports had claimed; finally NVIDIA emerged on the last day with a $7 billion+ all-cash offer, according to reports
Fundraising / investment:
Big data AI startup Noble.AI raises a second seed round from a chemical giant – Mar. 15, 2019 (TechCrunch)
- Noble.AI, an SF/French AI company that claims to accelerate decision making in R&D, has raised a new round of funding from Solvay Ventures, the VC arm of a large chemical company, Solvay SA. Although the round was undisclosed, TechCrunch understands it to be a second seed round, and we know the company has closed a total of $8.6 million to date
- As a chemical company, Solvay’s research arm generates huge volumes of data from various sources, which is part of the reason for the investment, confirmed the firm. Noble.AI’s “Universal Ingestion Engine” and “Intelligent Recommendation Engine” claim to enable the creation of high-quality data assets for these kinds of big data sets that can later be turned into recommendations for decision making inside these large businesses
AI photo startup Polarr raises an $11.5 million Series A – Mar. 14, 2019 (TechCrunch)
- Bay Area photography startup Polarr announced this morning that it has raised an $11.5 million Series A. The new round of funding, led by Threshold Ventures with participation from Pear Ventures and Cota Capital, brings the startup’s total funding to around $13.5 million, according to the company
- This round of funding will go toward research and development, engineering and partnerships, the latter of which are starting to become a big business for Polarr. In fact, it’s using the news to highlight the fact that it was tapped to bring its technology to the Samsung Galaxy S10’s native camera app. Polarr has previously teamed with other big hardware names, including Qualcomm and Oppo
GV leads $11 million round in Determined AI deep learning developer platform – Mar. 13, 2019 (VentureBeat)
- The funding will be used to grow its market footprint and hire more engineers with knowledge of distributed system design and understanding of how to functionally build AI applications
- It will also be used to bring a series of new features to its deep learning model development tool for data scientists and machine learning engineers, like ways to help developers identify and preprocess data sets, and help teams collaborate
Glia raises $20 million to unify voice, video, and chatbots – Mar. 13, 2019 (VentureBeat)
- Glia (formerly SaleMove), a New York startup cofounded by Justin DiPietro, Carlos Paniagua, and now-CEO Dan Michaeli in 2012, aims to capitalize on the trend with an omnichannel customer service platform that supports text, phone calls, video chat, and more
- Today the company announced that it has raised $20 million in series B funding led by Insight Venture Partners, with participation from current investors Tola Capital, Wildcat Capital Management, Grassy Creek, and Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator, bringing its total raised to $29 million
Automation Hero picks up $14.5 million led by Atomico – Mar. 13, 2019 (TechCrunch)
- Automation Hero, formerly SalesHero, has secured $14.5 million in new funding led by Atomico, with participation by Baidu Ventures and Cherry Ventures. As part of the deal, Atomico principal Ben Blume will join the company’s board of directors
- The automation startup launched in 2017 as SalesHero, giving sales orgs a simple way to automate back-office processes like filing an expense report or updating the CRM. It does this through an AI assistant called Robin — “Batman and Robin, it worked with the superhero theme, and it’s gender neutral,” co-founder and CEO Stefan Groschupf explained — that can be configured to go through the regular workflow and take care of repetitive tasks
Adthena raises $14 million to analyze ad campaigns with AI – Mar. 12, 2019 (VentureBeat)
- London-based Adthena is hoping to lure some of those soon-to-be customers with its AI-driven search marketing intelligence platform. Roughly seven years after its founding and a year after it established a presence in the U.S., the company is today announcing that it has raised $14 million in a series A funding round led by Updata Partners, bringing its total venture capital raised to $18.1 million. Founder and CEO Ian O’Rourke says the funds will be used to accelerate the company’s stateside and global growth and to “strengthen” product development as it prepares to launch new channels
- “[We’ve] already proven the value of the search clarity that we bring to marketers,” he said. “With Updata’s investment and experience, we aim to accelerate delivery of AI-driven capabilities customers have been asking for, while supporting an expanding client list in the U.S. This is a very exciting time for Adthena … as we embark on the next part of our journey.”
Vintra raises $4.8 million to analyze camera footage with AI – Mar. 11, 2019 (VentureBeat)
- Security camera ownership is on the rise worldwide — Global Market Insights predicts that the IP camera market will cross $20 billion in revenue by 2024, driven by a 20 percent uptick in unit shipments. And those cameras will generate lots of footage. That’s why today most surveillance footage — as much as 95 percent, some estimate — goes unreviewed
- San Jose startup Vintra hopes to change that with an AI toolset capable of analyzing frames from any source. Today the company announced that it has raised $4.8 million from Bonfire Ventures, Vertex Ventures, London Venture Partners, and other investors. Vintra CEO Brent Boekestein says the funds will be used to acquire new customers and expand the company’s product offerings
AI-based CRM platform Yalochat secures $8 M from Sierra Ventures, expands India ops – Mar. 11, 2019 (YourStory)
- According to a press statement, these funds will be used for Yalochat’s expansion of its operation and team across India. At present, Yalochat has offices in Mumbai, and aims to expand to other cities over the course of this year. It currently has Kerala government, RBL Bank, Edelweiss Tokio, and PayU using its platform. The company will also be hiring for each of its operational domains across locations, and has already made key hires including Kyle Passarelli, ex-PayPal Director of Engineering, as CTO of the company
Partnerships:
SINGULARITYNET PARTNERS WITH CHINESE GIANT PING AN – Mar. 15, 2019 (IcoExaminer)
- Ping An, which is one of the largest financial services companies in the world, will collaborate with SingularityNET on a spectrum of AI projects including Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and model training
- Explaining the compatibility of the two companies, SingularityNET CEO Dr Goertzel stated “Generally speaking, successful AI applications require at least four ingredients – AI algorithms, data, computer power and human understanding of the problem domain. Between SingularityNET and Ping An we have all four of these in abundance, and so I am confident we will be able to do great things together.”
C3 Announces 10 New Alliances With Leading System Integrators – Mar. 13, 2019 (AP News)
- C3, the leading enterprise AI software provider for accelerating digital transformation, today announced the C3 Partner Program to scale the implementation of C3 AI technology. The first 10 partners to join the program include BGP Management Consulting, CGI, Clarity Insights, intelia, Neal Analytics, Ortec, Pariveda Solutions, Solstice, and West Monroe Partners
- C3 Partner professionals will achieve certification on C3 AI Suite fundamentals and in specializations such as application development and data science. C3 Partners will help customers capture value more quickly by supporting implementations of the C3 AI Suite and C3 Applications, including C3 Predictive Maintenance, C3 Anti-Money Laundering, C3 Energy Management, C3 Fraud Detection, C3 Sensor Health, and C3 Inventory Optimization
KGS, UK Computer Science Collaborate on Sinkhole Machine-Learning Research – Mar. 11, 2019 (University of Kentucky)
- Since 2015, Junfeng Zhu, a hydrogeologist with the Kentucky Geological Survey, a research center within the University of Kentucky, has been investigating the use of machine learning to identify Kentucky sinkholes in aerial LiDAR (light detection and ranging) data. Machine learning uses an array of tools that help a computer learn and improve its abilities at a task without being programmed specifically for the task
Research / studies:
Driverless cars are more likely to hit people with darker skin because too many white people are used to train object recognition technology – Mar. 11, 2019 (Daily Mail)
- Autonomous cars are up to 12 per cent worse at spotting people with darker skin. It stems from a lack of dark-skinned individuals in tech’s training, experts say
- Experts say they hope the bias can be eradicated before the facial recognition technology is featured in autonomous cars that are put into production
Alexa researchers improve AI error rate up to 30% by reducing data imbalance – Mar. 11, 2019 (VentureBeat)
- Researchers at Amazon’s Alexa division say they’ve developed a technique that can reduce error rates in some data-imbalanced systems by up to 30 percent. They describe it in a recently published paper (“Deep Embeddings for Rare Audio Event Detection with Imbalanced Data”) scheduled to be presented at the International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing in Brighton this spring
- In order to prevent imbalance in the embeddings, data classes larger than any of the others were split into clusters roughly the size of the smallest class. And to shorten the time it took to measure the distance between data items, the system was designed to keep a running measurement of the centroid, or the point that minimizes the average distance of all points of the cluster
Government / policy:
Chinese children take to coding amid country’s lofty goals in AI, other hi-tech initiatives – Mar. 17, 2019 (South China Morning Post)
- The current wave of enthusiasm in China for coding education comes as the country moves to become an AI powerhouse, while lifting domestic hi-tech industries – from robotics, and aerospace to new materials and new energy vehicles – up the value chain to help transform the nation’s economy over the next decade
- “I initially thought I would need to spend a long time educating parents about the importance of teaching children how to code,” said Sun He, a graduate in computer science and technology at Tsinghua University, who founded children’s online coding class provider WeCode in Beijing last year. “That has not been the case. Parents clearly know the reasons.”
US SENATORS MOVED TO REGULATE FACIAL RECOGNITION TECHNOLOGIES – Mar. 17, 2019 (Z6 Mag)
- The bipartisan move, known as the Commercial Facial Recognition Privacy Act of 2019, was introduced by US Senators Roy Blunt and Brian Schatz in a bid to protect people’s facial recognition data and make it much harder for the data to be sold, now that information is treated as currency
- “Our faces are our identities. They’re personal. So the responsibility is on companies to ask people for their permission before they track and analyze their face,” Senator Schatz, ranking member of the Senate Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, Innovation, and the Internet, said