Big news this week for AI M&A with McDonald’s acquiring an Israeli AI startup for $300mm and Daimler Trucks acquiring an autonomous truck startup for an undisclosed amount. For those interested in reading more about the autonomous truck industry, take a look at one of my earlier posts on the industry. I expect to see a lot more M&A activity going forward.
Company developments:
Adobe taps Microsoft for voice AI to search and query contracts – Mar. 27, 2019 (VentureBeat)
- No release date has been set for the prototype feature produced by engineers and designers from Adobe’s R&D lab, but the intelligent agents capability could someday be incorporated into Adobe’s Document Cloud software suite so you could, for example, use your voice to query business cards stored in the Scan app
- Similar capabilities for other long documents, like white papers that appear in PDFs viewed in Acrobat, could also be in the works, an Adobe spokesperson told VentureBeat in a phone interview
Google creates external advisory board to monitor it for unethical AI use – Mar. 26, 2019 (The Verge)
- Google today announced a new external advisory board to help monitor the company’s use of artificial intelligence for ways in which it may violate ethical principles it laid out last summer. The group was announced by Kent Walker, Google’s senior vice president of global affairs, and it includes experts on a wide-ranging series of subjects, including mathematics, computer science, engineering, philosophy, public policy, psychology, and even foreign policy
- The group will be called the Advanced Technology External Advisory Council, and it appears Google wants it to be seen as a kind of independent watchdog keeping an eye on how it deploys AI in the real world, with a focus on facial recognition and the mitigation of built-in bias in machine learning training methods. “This group will consider some of Google’s most complex challenges that arise under our AI Principles … providing diverse perspectives to inform our work,” Walker writes
Drive.ai pulls the plug on self-driving service in Frisco, Texas – Mar. 26, 2019 (VentureBeat)
- Self-driving car startup Drive.ai is pulling out of Frisco, Texas — one of its launch cities — later this week, the company announced on Monday. This move comes months after it began piloting its driverless tech in Arlington, Texas and shortly after reports emerged that the San Francisco startup has been actively seeking a buyerNot surprised that Drive.ai is looking at potential M&A options. I highlighted them as one of my top early stage investment recommendations back in 2017 as part of my AI VC thesis, in part due to their exit via acquisition potential
- The reason for Drive.ai pulling the plug? Its contract with Frisco, where Drive.ai has operated a small fleet of autonomous Nissan NV200s shuttles on a single route between an office park and a high-end shopping complex, ends later this month. (The City of Frisco opted not to renew it, citing high costs.)
M&A:
Daimler Trucks to Acquire Majority Stake in Autonomous-Driving Firm Torc Robotics – Mar. 31, 2019 (The Drive)
- Torc Robotics was founded in 2005 by veterans of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) challenges of the early 2000s, an effort by the military to kickstart development of autonomous vehicles. Torc has kept a lower profile than other autonomous-driving tech companies but has tested prototype self-driving cars in its hometown of Blacksburg, Virginia, and in Las Vegas. Torc’s autonomous-driving system is named Asimov, after science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov. He wrote I, Robot, so the reference is appropriate
- Daimler Trucks did not say how much it plans to pay for its stake in Torc (which is still subject to regulatory approval) but did mention it hopes to leverage Torc’s expertise to develop self-driving trucks. The company said it is “working on a truck chassis perfectly suited for automated driving, particularly the redundancy of systems needed to provide the maximum level of reliability and safety.”
McDonald’s buys Israeli AI co Dynamic Yield for $300m – Mar. 26, 2019 (Globes)
- US fast food giant McDonald’s Corporation (NYSE: MCD) has announced an agreement to acquire Israeli AI startup Dynamic Yield, which develops personalization and decision logic technology. No financial details were disclosed but the “Wall Street Journal” and “Techcrunch” both said that McDonald’s is paying over $300 million, its largest acquisition in the past 20 years
- McDonald’s said that it will utilize the Tel Aviv based company’s decision technology to provide an even more personalized customer experience by varying outdoor digital Drive Thru menu displays to show food based on time of day, weather, current restaurant traffic and trending menu items. The decision technology, McDonald’s added, can also instantly suggest and display additional items to a customer’s order based on their current selections
Fundraising / investment:
DocuSign invests $15 million in AI contract discovery startup Seal Software – Mar. 28, 2019 (VentureBeat)
- DocuSign is investing heavily in AI. Literally. The San Francisco provider of electronic signature and digital transaction management services today announced that it’s putting $15 million toward Seal Software, a seal contract discovery and analytics startup that uses machine learning to find and parse contracts, building on an existing partnership between the two companies
- It follows DocuSign’s acquisition of intellectual property rights from machine learning startup Appuri in December 2017, and its purchase of text search and document indexing startup SpringCM last September. And it comes after Bay Area-based Seal — which was founded in 2010 by Kevin Gidney and Ulf Zetterberg, and which recently reported growth of more than 85 percent year-on-year — raised $30 million from Toba Capital, bringing its total raised to $43 million
Partnerships:
VW, Ford to develop pickup truck, continue talks on autonomous driving – Mar. 28, 2019 (Reuters)
- Volkswagen has signed a deal to develop a pickup truck with U.S. rival Ford and continues discussions about extending its alliance to include autonomous driving and mobility services, the German carmaker said on Thursday
- “We are in constructive talks about taking a stake in Argo, the Ford division for autonomous driving. A joint company for offering mobility as a service is also a possibility,” Volkswagen’s commercial vehicles chief executive Thomas Sedran said on Thursday
Universal mCloud Joins Forces with Ecotricity’s Britwind to Upgrade Wind Turbines and to Improve Performance with AI and Analytics – Mar. 26, 2019 (Microsmallcap)
- Britwind is a full-service company in the small and medium-size wind segment with proven excellence in wind energy production, operations, and maintenance. In collaboration with Britwind partner Norwin Energy, Britwind has designed an upgrade to a fleet of over 1,000 Endurance E-series turbines, for which Ecotricity acquired IP rights in 2017 and addresses structural risks present in the installed fleet
- Through the upgrade, called rEsolve, mCloud and Britwind are working together to offer Britwind customers a complete end-to-end upgrade solution on a subscription basis. The solution will include the opportunity to use mCloud’s AI and analytics to enhance the operation of their wind turbines alongside a 5-year warranty. The rEsolve solution enables E-series owners, most based in the UK, to extend the life of the E-series machines and improve turbine performance for the benefit of both owners and the environment
Research / studies:
The Pancreatic Cancer Collective Funds Two New Research Teams Using Artificial Intelligence To Identify High-Risk Pancreatic Cancer Populations – Mar. 30, 2019 (PR Newswire)
- The Pancreatic Cancer Collective, the strategic partnership of Lustgarten Foundation and Stand Up To Cancer (SU2C), today announced two, million-dollar grants for computational approaches to identifying high-risk pancreatic cancer populations. The grant money will be used to develop novel tools to identify individuals who are at high risk for developing pancreatic cancer that will be based on their health records. The announcement was made at the Annual Meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research
- The two teams will each pursue a different approach to identifying individuals in the general population who are at high risk for pancreatic cancer. One will use molecular and genetic data taken from a variety of datasets to identify new and accessible ways to identify high-risk individuals. The other focuses on identification of high-risk individuals by applying machine learning analysis to real world data comprising radiological images, electronic medical records, and information collected by physicians. Each team will receive up to $1 million over two years
UT acquires simulator to drive autonomous vehicle research – Mar. 27, 2019 (Daily Texan Online)
- The UT Center for Electromechanics recently installed a Cruden simulator to accelerate research into self-driving vehicles and automotive efficiency. The simulator allows a driver to get behind the wheel in an adjustable cockpit that realistically moves in all directions. Auditory and visual stimuli are provided to the driver in real time by a 210-degree screen to model driving any vehicle in any condition
- “This is the only simulator of its kind in a (United States) university,” said Junmin Wang, the director of the mobility systems laboratory. “The driver will feel like he or she is driving in a real car on a real road.” The simulator can run a scenario made from data collected by an actual self-driving car and measure a user’s acceptance levels to the machine’s driving style, Wang said. It can also send data from the simulator to the self-driving car for testing in the field
Artificial intelligence can predict premature death, study finds – Mar. 27, 2019 (Science Daily)
- They found this AI system was very accurate in its predictions and performed better than the current standard approach to prediction developed by human experts. The study is published by PLOS ONE in a special collections edition of “Machine Learning in Health and Biomedicine.”
- Leading the work, Assistant Professor of Epidemiology and Data Science, Dr Stephen Weng, said: “Preventative healthcare is a growing priority in the fight against serious diseases so we have been working for a number of years to improve the accuracy of computerised health risk assessment in the general population. Most applications focus on a single disease area but predicting death due to several different disease outcomes is highly complex, especially given environmental and individual factors that may affect them
Amazon and National Science Foundation earmark $10 million for AI fairness research – Mar. 25, 2019 (VentureBeat)
- Amazon wants to minimize bias and address issues of transparency and accountability in AI. To that end, the Seattle company today announced that it will partner with the National Science Foundation (NSF) to commit up to $10 million in research grants over the next three years to develop systems focused on fairness in AI and machine learning
- “With the increasing use of AI in everyday life, fairness in artificial intelligence is a topic of increasing importance across academia, government, and industry,” wrote Prem Natarajan, VP of natural understanding in the Alexa AI group, in a blog post. “Here at Amazon, the fairness of the machine learning systems we build to support our businesses is critical to establishing and maintaining our customers’ trust.”
Events:
‘Godfathers of AI’ honored with Turing Award, the Nobel Prize of computing – Mar. 27, 2019 (The Verge)
- Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton, and Yann LeCun — sometimes called the ‘godfathers of AI’ — have been recognized with the $1 million annual prize for their work developing the AI subfield of deep learning. The techniques the trio developed in the 1990s and 2000s enabled huge breakthroughs in tasks like computer vision and speech recognition. Their work underpins the current proliferation of AI technologies, from self-driving cars to automated medical diagnoses
- All three have since taken up prominent places in the AI research ecosystem, straddling academia and industry. Hinton splits his time between Google and the University of Toronto; Bengio is a professor at the University of Montreal and started an AI company called Element AI; while LeCun is Facebook’s chief AI scientist and a professor at NYU