Relatively slow week in the AI world. Major highlights include Uber’s acquisition of Mighty AI and Argo AI funding a $15mm research center at Carnegie Mellon. More weekly news below.
M&A:
Uber buys AI firm to advance push on autonomous cars – Jun. 26, 2019 (France 24)
- Uber said Wednesday it has acquired computer vision startup Mighty AI to help advance its technology for self-driving cars. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, but the ride-hailing giant said some 40 employees from the Seattle-based firm would join Uber’s advanced technology group developing plans for autonomous taxis
- Mighty AI specializes in computer vision, a field within artificial intelligence that is used to better understand or “label” the surroundings of vehicles that will be deployed autonomously. “The team at Mighty AI has built technology to label at scale using the latest AI and user experience techniques,” said Jon Thomason, vice president of software engineering for the Uber division
Apple acquires self-driving vehicle startup Drive.ai (updated) – Jun. 25, 2019 (VentureBeat)
- Self-driving car startup Drive.ai will cease all operations and lay off 90 employees, according to a June 12 filing with California’s Employment Development Department that was initially spotted by the San Francisco Chronicle. The news comes after reports that Apple was exploring an acquisition of Drive.ai to bolster the former’s secretive self-driving car project
- Drive.ai general counsel Thomas Yih wrote in the letter that the closure was necessitated “[by] events beyond Drive.ai’s control or current knowledge.” CEO Bijit Halder will be among those out of work when Drive.ai’s Mountain View office shutters on Friday, along with the company’s directors of finance and robotics
Fundraising / investment:
Cathay Innovation leads Laiye’s $35M round to bet on Chinese enterprise IT – Jun. 27, 2019 (TechCrunch)
- One startup making waves in China’s enterprise software market is four-year-old Laiye, which just raised a $35 million Series B round led by cross-border venture capital firm Cathay Innovation. Existing backers Wu Capital, a family fund, and Lightspeed China Partners, whose founding partner James Mi has been investing in every round of Laiye since Pre-A, also participated in this Series B
- The deal came on the heels of Laiye’s merger with Chinese company Awesome Technology, a team that’s spent the last 18 years developing Robotic Process Automation, a term for technology that lets organizations offload repetitive tasks like customer service onto machines. With this marriage, Laiye officially launched its RPA product UiBot to compete in the nascent and fast-growing market for streamlining workflow
Bleckwen raises $10 million to detect payment fraud with AI – Jun. 26, 2019 (VentureBeat)
- Bleckwen, a cybersecurity firm developing fraud detection and prevention systems for banks and financial technology companies, today emerged from stealth with $10 million in a funding round led by Ring Capital. Newly appointed CEO David Christie said the round, which included participation from TempoCap, Bpifrance, and Ineo, will support the Paris-based startup’s international expansion and continued software development
- “Nearly $4 trillion is stolen and laundered through banks annually, and existing technologies are just not cutting it in the fight against this scourge of society. Something else needs to be done, and at Bleckwen we have made tremendous progress … developing solutions to bring the fight to these criminals,” said Christie, a 20-year financial services veteran who previously served as COO of U.S. payments provider Euronet’s money transfer business
Ocrolus raises $24 million to scan financial documents with computer vision – Jun. 25, 2019 (VentureBeat)
- Ocrolus, a New York startup that taps AI and machine learning to parse financial documents, today announced it has raised $24 million in a series B round led by venture growth equity firm Oak HC/FT. Ocrolus cofounder and CEO Sam Bobley said the fresh capital, which follows a $4 million series A in April 2018 and brings the company’s total raised to about $30 million, will fuel expansion into verticals like consumer and auto lending and advance development of the company’s underwriting solutions for banks
Flyr raises $10 million for AI that helps airlines predict fares – Jun. 24, 2019 (VentureBeat)
- Flyr, a company developing data analytics products that forecast airfare volatility, today revealed (via an interview with Kambr Media) that it has raised over $10 million in second-round funding. The fresh capital brings the company’s total raised to roughly $25 million, and Flyr CTO and cofounder Alexander Mans says it will be used to promote research and development, expedite product updates, and expand the company’s workforce of 85 employees
- Flyr, which Mans cofounded in 2013 with Cyril Guiraud and Jean Tripier, launched with a consumer focus and is currently based in Poland and San Francisco. Much like Hopper, Volantio, Kayak, Google Flights, and other real-time airline booking services on the market, it tracked fares to highlight optimal booking times based on factors like price and availability and let travelers lock in the price of an airline ticket for a one-time fee of about $20. But several years ago, Flyr began pivoting to a strictly enterprise model, which culminated in the launch of its FusionRM suite of predictive airfare tools
Pittsburgh self-driving car company Argo AI funding $15M Carnegie Mellon research center – Jun. 24, 2019 (Trib Live)
- “This investment allows our researchers to continue to lead at the nexus of technology and society, and to solve society’s most pressing problems,” CMU President Farnam Jahanian said. “Together, Argo AI and CMU will accelerate critical research in autonomous vehicles while building on the momentum of CMU’s culture of innovation.”
- Deva Ramanan, an associate professor at CMU’s Robotics Institute, will serve as the research center’s principal investigator. Projects will involve other CMU faculty members and students. Researchers will have access to fleet-scale data sets, vehicles and large-scale infrastructure, information that’s not readily available but critical for advancing self-driving technologies
Research / studies:
AI predicts college student stress from phone sensor and questionnaire data – Jun. 28, 2019 (VentureBeat)
- They report that their model achieved state-of-the-art performance, obtaining a 45.1% improvement compared with the baseline on a data set of student sleep patterns, activity, conversation, location, information regarding mental health (like stress levels), and more
- The researchers’ AI system — Cross-personal Activity LSTM Multitask Auto-encoder Network, or CALM-Net — considers data as time-series (i.e., taken at successive equally-spaced points in time) and can identify temporal patterns contained within it. Additionally, it offers the ability to personalize models and incorporate time-series information, which improves performance as the number of students increases. And it infers and measures things like day of the week, sleep rating, sleep duration, and time to next assignment deadline
AI helps drones navigate forests and other ‘cluttered’ environments – Jun. 24, 2019 (VentureBeat)
- Cutting-edge drones from companies like DJI and Parrot have no trouble navigating obstacle-strewn environments, but when faced with a never-before-seen landscape like dense woods or a maze, they have a tougher time reaching goal destinations autonomously. That’s why scientists at Intel Labs and Mexico’s Center for Research and Advanced Studies of the National Polytechnic Institute recently investigated a framework for self-guided drone navigation in “cluttered” unknown environment
- They describe their work in a paper (“Autonomous Navigation of MAVs in Unknown Cluttered Environments“) published on the preprint server Arxiv.org. In both qualitative and quantitative tests involving Intel’s Ready to Fly drone kit, they say that their real-time, on-device family of algorithms achieve state-of-the-art performance