Relatively slow week in the AI world. Big news comes from Coursera, who raised a $103mm Series E round. The education tech startup has attracted a lot of attention in the past few years and plans to use the proceeds to further expand internationally.
Interesting week in the AI world. In the U.S., top executives at Google met with top U.S. military generals to discuss Google’s work with China on AI research. Can’t help but notice that Google might be singled out here given Project Maven (Microsoft, Amazon and other U.S. tech giants also have AI operations in China).
Meanwhile, on the IPO front Megvii is looking to IPO later this year at an ~US$800mm valuation. As one of the top facial recognition startups in the world in the biggest facial recognition market (China), I’d flag this as one of the top IPOs in 2019 to watch.
Big news this week is centered around the AI chip industry. Out in China, Horizon Robotics has raised a massive $600mm series B led by SK China. They’re already backed by Intel and will use the proceeds to continue expanding their capabilities in what’s known to be a very competitive space.
Meanwhile in the U.S., Google Ventures has invested in Lightmatter, an AI chip startup out of Boston. More weekly news can be found below.
Big week highlight this week is Baidu’s development of simultaneous language translation through one of their AI programs. It’s considered a major step forward in the natural language processing realm.
Elsewhere on the M&A side Lyft made an acquisition of Blue Vision to further enhance their autonomous vehicle program.
Big week for Samsung as they announced an acquisition of Spanish AI company Zhilabs to bolster their 5G capabilities, and separately opened an AI research center in Montreal (their 4th AI center in North America).
Meanwhile on the partnership front, Baidu became the 1st major Chinese tech company to join the American-led Partnership for AI (PAI). Current members include Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Microsoft, who also collaborate with government entities like the UN and Human Rights Watch.
Big week across the board in the AI world. To start, there were a few developments related to social good including Microsoft’s $40mm fund dedicated to developers focused on solving humanitarian problems and Google using its AI to predict floods in India. We definitely to see more of this. For the major company developments, look no further than DeepMind partnering with Unity to develop simulated AI training environments and Ford potentially eyeing an IPO for its self-driving car unit.
One industry that AI is already having an enormous impact on is the logistics industry. As such, I’ve decided to pursue a series of posts relating to four main areas of logistics being impacted by AI. These areas are 1. Truckload shipping 2. Air / drone shipping 3. Maritime shipping and 4. Rail freight shipping. This first article will focus on truckload shipping. I’ll provide a quick overview of the trucking industry, my thoughts on the top use cases of AI in the industry, and highlight AI startups tackling these use cases.
Partnerships: Nvidia, Continental to develop self-driving system based on Nvidia Drive “Nvidia has inked a deal with Continental to create self-driving vehicle systems built on the Nvidia Drive platform for the automaker’s car lineup starting in 2021″ “The companies will initially develop automated Level 2 features, including 360-degree perception, automatic lane changing on highways, and… Read More »