Two big M&A announcements this week in the AI space. The first one is Salesforce, who acquired Bonobo AI out of Israel for an undisclosed price. Bonobo AI specializes in analyzing customer interactions for sales teams. Acquisition clearly makes sense for Salesforce.
The other big acquisition this week is Square acquiring Eloquent Labs, who provides a conversational AI assistant named “Ellie”. This acquisition should help bolster Square’s NLP capabilities. Other weekly news can be found below.
Company developments:
Drivent exits stealth mode with suite of products to encourage self-driving car adoption – May. 6, 2019 (Geek Wire)
- The startup is operating in a market eager to embrace autonomous vehicle technology. Bellevue (where Drivent is based) is planning to launch a new service for commuters that uses autonomous vehicles. The city is seeking private funding to test autonomous vehicles along fixed routes downtown at low speeds. The launch date is dependent on fundraising but officials hope to launch tests during the final quarter of 2019
- Drivent has five employees and has raised investment, but Wengreen declined to provide details about total funding to date or the company’s backers. It’s one of a handful of companies that received approval from Washington state officials to test autonomous vehicle technologies. Other approved companies include Waymo, NVIDIA, and TORC Robotics
Microsoft debuts Ideas in Word, a grammar and style suggestions tool powered by AI – May. 6, 2019 (VentureBeat)
- Ideas in Word builds on Editor, an AI-powered proofreader for Office 365 that was announced in July 2016 and replaced the Spelling & Grammar pane in Office 2016 later that year. Ideas in Words similarly taps natural language processing and machine learning to deliver intelligent, contextually aware suggestions that could improve a document’s readability
- n practice, Ideas for Word might propose swapping “society as a whole” for the more concise “society.” And with each suggestion, it’ll provide justifications and explanations, such as why “then” should be used in place of “than” in a specific context
M&A:
Salesforce to Acquire Bonobo AI – May. 10, 2019 (FINSMES)
- Global CRM leader Salesforce (NYSE: CRM) signed a definitive agreeemnt to acquire Bonobo AI, an Israeli provider of a conversational intelligence platform for organizations seeking to know their customers and grow customer relationships at scale. The amount of the deal was not disclosed
- Based in Tel Aviv, Israel, NYC and Palo Alto, CA, Bonobo provides a conversational intelligence platform for organizations to analyze customer interactions, empowering sales teams to spot trends and improve conversations
Square acquires conversational AI startup Eloquent Labs – May. 7, 2019 (TechCrunch)
- Eloquent Labs, which raised a $1.5 million seed round back in early 2017, offers to small businesses a conversational assistant named Elle. The idea is that Elle will help merchants with common customer service-related issues like returns, product tracking and FAQs
- “Eloquent’s conversational AI services are exactly the kind of technology that can level the playing field for businesses of all sizes by providing sellers efficient ways to interact with their customers,” Square wrote in a blog post. “The team will advance messaging across our entire ecosystem, and together we will build tools that leverage the latest in natural language processing research.”
Fundraising / investment:
Tunisia-founded enterprise AI startup InstaDeep raises $7 million Series A – May. 12, 2019 (Menabytes)
- Tunisia-founded enterprise AI startup InstaDeep has raised $7 million in Series A funding, the startup announced last week, adding that the investment was led by leading Tunisian private equity firm AfricInvest and joined by Endeavor Catalyst
- Founded in Tunis in 2014 by Karim Beguir and Zohra Slim, InstaDeep that’s now headquartered in London, utilizes different advanced machine learning techniques including deep reinforcement learning to bring AI to applications within an enterprise environment, allowing companies to optimize their decision-making process and improve efficiency
Pearl raises $11 million to analyze dental scans with AI – May. 8, 2019 (VentureBeat)
- Pearl, a Santa Monica, California-based startup applying AI to dentistry, today announced that it’s raised $11 million in series A funding led by Craft Ventures and unnamed strategic dental industry partners
- CEO Ophir Tanz, a Carnegie Mellon graduate who spearheaded the development of AI dental technologies at GumGum before spinning out his work into Pearl, said the fresh capital will further Pearl’s progress toward creating a holistic oral health platform
Sumo Logic raises $110 million to orchestrate cloud apps with AI – May. 8, 2019 (VentureBeat)
- The company today announced that it has raised $110 million in a series G funding round led by Battery Ventures, with contributions from Tiger Global Management and Franklin Templeton. This brings the company’s total capital raised to $345 million, following a $75 million funding round in June 2017 and an $80 million round in June 2015, and it’s Sumo Logic’s largest round to date
- The infusion follows a breakout year in which Sumo Logic notched over $100 million in revenue and hit the 2,000-customer mark. It’s now valued at over $1 billion, has more than 500 employees, and counts among its client base Airbnb, Pinterest, The Pokémon Co., Samsung SmartThings, Zuora, AB InBev, Adobe, Alaska Airlines, BBC Genesys, Hearst Media, Infor, Levi’s Marriott, Pitney Bowes, and USA Today
Chinese AI start-up Megvii raises $750 million ahead of planned HK IPO – May. 8, 2019 (Reuters)
- Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) provider Megvii Technology Ltd, commonly known as Face++, said on Wednesday it raised $750 million in its latest funding round. The funding raises start-up Megvii’s valuation to slightly over $4 billion as it prepares for an initial public offering (IPO) in Hong Kong planned for later this year, said two sources with knowledge of the matter
- Bank of China Group Investment (BOCGI) Ltd, the state bank’s private equity arm, led the fundraising with $200 million, they said. BOCGI declined to comment on the fundraising. Macquarie Group, ICBC Asset Management (Global) Co and a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, one of the world’s biggest sovereign wealth funds, also joined the new round, Megvii said in a statement
GM’s self-driving division Cruise raises another $1.15 billion – May. 7, 2019 (The Verge)
- Cruise Automation, the self-driving division of General Motors, announced on Tuesday that it has secured a $1.15 billion investment, raising its post-money valuation to an eye-popping $19 billion. The money was raised from a “group comprising institutional investors, including funds and accounts advised by T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc., and existing partners General Motors, SoftBank Vision Fund and Honda,” Cruise said in a statement
- It’s another enormous boost for GM’s Cruise. Last May, it announced a $2.25 billion investment from the SoftBank Vision Fund, a major venture investment effort that was started by the Japanese tech giant in 2016. Then, in October, GM said it would team up with Honda to design a purpose-built self-driving car. The Japanese automaker said it would devote $2 billion to the effort over 12 years, including a $750 million equity investment in Cruise
Google awards $25 million in global AI impact grants – May. 7, 2019 (VentureBeat)
- Google today awarded $25 million in grants to a range of organizations to help them apply machine learning to fight some of the world’s biggest challenges. Recipients range from New York City’s fire department, which wants to find ways to reduce emergency call response time, to an experiment to track air quality with sensors attached to mopeds in Uganda, information that may shape public policy
- The program is also an extension of Google’s AI for Social Good program, which provides flood forecasting to communities in India and is researching how to provide speech recognition for more people with disabilities
Partnerships:
Google and Carbon Tracker to use AI to track emissions from world’s power plants – May. 9, 2019 (Business Green)
- On Monday leading sustainable investment Carbon Tracker revealed plans to use satellite imagery to quantify carbon emissions from all large power plants worldwide, thanks to $1.7m in grant funding from Google AI Impact Challenge
- AI technology will use the latest image processing algorithms to detect signs of power plant emissions, drawing on multiple indicators to identify them. These range from thermal infrared technology to detect heat near smoke stacks and cooling water intake to visual spectrum recognition, which registers that a plant is emitting smoke
Lyft users will be able to hail driverless Waymo cars in Phoenix – May. 7, 2019 (VentureBeat)
- “This first step in our partnership will allow us to introduce the Waymo Driver to Lyft users, enabling them to take what for many will be their first ride in a self-driving vehicle,” Waymo CEO John Krafcik wrote in a blog post. “We’re committed to continuously improving our customer experience, and our partnership with Lyft will also give our teams the opportunity to collect valuable feedback.”
Grid4C Partners with Landis+Gyr to Embed AI-Powered Analytics into Smart Meters at the Grid Edge – May. 6, 2019 (AP News)
- Award winning AI-powered energy analytics company Grid4C has partnered with Landis+Gyr, a leading global provider of energy management solutions, to embed its predictive analytics software solutions within smart meters at the edge of the electric grid to solve the industry’s next generation use cases in real-time
- The joint effort builds upon an existing and successful partnership to deliver AI-powered energy analytics for energy providers in Australia, New Zealand and Hong Kong, and expands Landis+Gyr’s Grid Edge portfolio with its “Advanced Application Platform” (AAP) communications modules within its electricity smart meters
Research / studies:
MIT CSAIL’s AI can predict the onset of breast cancer 5 years in advance – May. 7, 2019 (VentureBeat)
- Their work builds on that of Google AI, which in October said it had developed a model that could detect metastatic breast cancer with 99% accuracy, and Alphabet’s DeepMind, which last year validated an AI system with the University College London exhibiting “near-human performance” on CT scans
- “Rather than taking a one-size-fits-all approach, we can personalize screening around a woman’s risk of developing cancer,” said Regina Barzilay, a senior author of a new paper who’s herself a breast cancer survivor. “For example, a doctor might recommend that one group of women get a mammogram every other year, while another higher-risk group might get supplemental MRI screening.”
Government / policy:
U.S. Lawmakers Propose Algorithmic Accountability Act – May. 10, 2019 (Mondaq)
- On April 10, 2019, U.S. lawmakers introduced the Algorithmic Accountability Act (the AAA). The bill is sponsored by U.S. Senators Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Cory Booker (D-NJ), and Representative Yvette Clarke (D-NY) sponsored a House of Representatives equivalent bill. The AAA empowers the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to promulgate regulations requiring covered entities to conduct impact assessments of algorithmic “automated decision systems” (including machine learning and artificial intelligence) to evaluate their “accuracy, fairness, bias, discrimination, privacy and security.”
Events:
AI Expo 2019 kicks off in Eastern China’s Suzhou – May. 9, 2019 (PR Newswire)
- Focusing on the new trends and characteristics of the artificial intelligence (AI) development, the expo aims at comprehensively displaying the technological innovations and the latest applications in the AI field through five main sections including exhibition, forums, contest, award ceremony and performance
- More than 1,000 AI products and innovative solutions from nearly 200 leading companies from home and abroad in the AI industry like Microsoft, Siemens, NVIDIA, Huawei, Cambricon, 360 and Aispeech, will be showcased during the expo