This week we saw some interesting M&A activity. Microsoft made yet another acquisition in the field of AI. This time they acquired Lobe, who’s developed an AI drag and drop tool. In addition we saw U.K. based Medopad acquire Sherbit to continue to enhance their AI driven disease detection solutions. KPMG has previously said Medopad… Read More »
Heavy week on the fundraising side. In particular, lots of Chinese AI startups raised money this week including Moviebook, Suiyuan, and Tianrang. In addition to startup fundraising, nonprofits were big winners this week as well. AI4All, a nonprofit working to increase diversity and inclusion in artificial intelligence, received a $1mm grant from Google. It’s great to… Read More »
Quite an interesting week in AI. To start, Anthony Levandowski is rumored to be back in the game through Kache.ai, an autonomous trucking startup. This comes after the infamous legal headaches he created for Waymo and Uber’s autonomous vehicle programs. In China, Baidu had a very busy week adding Daimler trucks to Project Apollo, which… Read More »
This week we saw another tech giant face internal push back on partnering with the government on AI initiatives. It was Google over the past few weeks with Project Maven, and now it’s Amazon with the use of its facial recognition software with U.S. police departments. Will be interesting to see if this trend continues.… Read More »
Busy week in many different areas of the AI world. Highlights include Google hosting their annual I/O festival for developers, and the White House finally taking concrete steps to foster AI collaboration between the private sector and government by hosting an AI summit. Meanwhile, on the autonomous vehicle front, Drive.AI announced a ride-haling services pilot program… Read More »
This week’s news features interesting developments with regards to fundraising. Sinovation Ventures landed Spanish bank BBVA as a new LP, and BenevolentAI raised over $100mm to continue its development of AI for drug discovery. Company developments: Jack Ma says Alibaba ‘doing a lot of research’ on driverless cars – Apr. 19, 2018 (Phys.org) “What we… Read More »
Fundraising / investment Woebot Secures $8 Million in Funding to Increase Access to Mental Health Care Worldwide – Mar. 1, 2018 (Nasdaq Global Newswire) Woebot Labs, Inc. announced an $8 million Series A funding round from leading venture capital firm New Enterprise Associates (NEA) with participation from Andrew Ng’s newly launched AI Fund The announcement… Read More »
Company developments: Yandex shows off the first tests of self-driving cars on Moscow roads – Feb. 16, 2018 (TechCrunch) Russian search and internet services giant Yandex has been working on its autonomous driving program, and its most recent achievement is a public self-driving pilot of its self-driving test car in Moscow, the first such test… Read More »