Monday, October 7

Tag: AI

AI-powered Home Maintenance Platform Dobby Secures $1.7 Million in Seed Round
FUNDING

AI-powered Home Maintenance Platform Dobby Secures $1.7 Million in Seed Round

WASHINGTON, Dec. 3, 2020-- Dobby, an AI-powered home maintenance platform raises $1.7 million in the seed round of funding. The capital will use to strengthen the company's growth initiatives, and spotlight its proprietary, automated, AI-first experience to homeowners, service providers, and ancillary beneficiaries such as real estate agents. This equity finance raise comes as Dobby scales to meet strong demand in the home maintenance sector, which, according to a Bank of America spending report, is seeing home maintenance consumer spending 60% above the Jan-2020 level. "During my days at DataRobot, I saw an opportunity to build an AI-first company from the ground up in a large and unsexy industry," said Satadru Sangupta, Dobby's CEO and co-founder. "I chose home maintenance beca...
Facebook Acquires Chatbot Startup Kustomer
ACQUISITION

Facebook Acquires Chatbot Startup Kustomer

Social media platform Facebook acquire Kustomer, a customer service chatbot for an undisclosed sum. But according to The Wall Street Journal sources the deal has valued the company around $1 billion. Kustomer is an omnichannel CRM platform that brings customer conversations from various channels together into a single-screen view. It helps businesses automate repetitive tasks so their agents can maximize the time and quality of interactions with customers. Facebook plans to use Kustomer’s bot in its Whatsapp and messenger service to scale the client's businesses and innovate its product offering via automation. Facebook in its press release said, "We’ve witnessed this shift firsthand as every day more than 175 million people contact businesses via WhatsApp. This number is growing ...
ServiceNow to Acquire AI based Element AI
ACQUISITION

ServiceNow to Acquire AI based Element AI

SANTA CLARA, Calif., 30th Nov 2020-- ServiceNow (NYSE: NOW) to acquire Element AI, a leading artificial intelligence (AI) company with deep AI capabilities and some of the world’s brightest AI minds. Element AI will significantly enhance ServiceNow’s commitment to build the world’s most intelligent workflow platform, enabling employees to work smarter and faster, streamline business decisions, and unlock new levels of productivity. Element AI has world-class scientists and practitioners who will bring expertise in applying modern AI to text and language, chat, images, search, question response, and summarization and will accelerate AI innovation natively in the Now Platform. With the acquisition of Element AI, ServiceNow will create an AI Innovation Hub in Canada to accelerate cu...
Roots Automation Raises $3.2M Seed Funding Round
FUNDING

Roots Automation Raises $3.2M Seed Funding Round

NEW YORK, Nov. 11, 2020-- Roots Automation, the NYC-based Digital Coworkers as a Service company, has raised a $3.2M seed round led by Vestigo Ventures. Launched by Chaz Perera and John Cottongim, Roots Automation aims to empower companies to free their 'roots' their people to focus on meaningful and impactful work. "Vestigo Ventures has been incredible throughout our seed funding journey and we're extremely thankful for their support," said Co-Founder and CEO, Chaz Perera. "The partnership between Vestigo Ventures and Roots Automation is the ideal combination of enterprise technology and startup expertise together, we'll continue to fuel growth opportunities instead of mundane tasks for our customers." Vestigo Ventures is an early-stage startup venture capital fund specifically for ...
Shutterstock acquire AI Music Platform Amper Music
ACQUISITION

Shutterstock acquire AI Music Platform Amper Music

NEW YORK, Nov. 11, 2020-- Shutterstock, a leading licensed photographs platform acquire Amper Music.  Amper Music is a leading AI-driven music platform that enables users to create and customize original music by leveraging over one million individual audio samples recorded by musicians on thousands of unique instruments. Shutterstock's acquisition of Amper strengthens its capabilities in artificial intelligence, particularly in content search and discovery of tracks composed by Shutterstock's community of artists as well as editing tools for Shutterstock users. As part of the transaction, Amper's employees will join the Shutterstock team and will bolster Shutterstock's focus on enhancing customer experience through new AI-supported functionalities and tools. "We're delighted ...
Canvass Analytics Raises $6.5 Million Funding Led by Yamaha Motor Ventures
FUNDING

Canvass Analytics Raises $6.5 Million Funding Led by Yamaha Motor Ventures

SILICON VALLEY, Calif., 29th Oct 2020-- Yamaha Motor Ventures, the strategic business development and investment arm of Yamaha Motor, led a USD$6.5 million funding round for Canvass Analytics (Canvass), a global leader in industrial Artificial Intelligence (AI) advanced analytics. The investment in Canvass analytics represents Yamaha Motor Ventures’ strategic focus on innovative technologies that work to solve global, societal challenges including increasing efficiency to reduce environmental impact. Canvass’s vision is to transform manufacturing by empowering the workforce of the future. According to IDC, operational data will increase by 2-3x by 2025, but the MAPI Foundation found that 47% of industrial workforces lacked the digital skills needed to derive value...
Deepsync Tech raises $300k from three angel funds
FUNDING

Deepsync Tech raises $300k from three angel funds

Sept 8th, 2020: Deepsync Technologies, which allows users to clone their voice to augment content production through Artificial Intelligence (AI), has raised about $300,000 (Over Rs 2.2 crore) from three angel funds Anicut Angel Fund, 9Unicorns and Firstcheque. The startup is expected to use the capital to expand business operations, ramp up tech and product development, and expand its technology team. This is the second round of fundraising for the company. Early-stage investor Zeroth.AI is an existing investor in the company. Anjan Ghosal and Venkat Raju were the leads in this investment on behalf of Anicut Angel Fund while the other investors who participated in this round through the fund were Ashvin Chadha, Sanjiv Bajaj, Varun Thapar, Pran Mehra, and Tushar Singh. A representat...
Chinese Company Files $1.4 Billion Lawsuit Against Apple
CHINA

Chinese Company Files $1.4 Billion Lawsuit Against Apple

Shanghai, 3rd Aug 2020: Chinese artificial intelligence company Shanghai Zhizhen Intelligent Network Technology Co, Ltd, also known as Xiao-i, has filed a lawsuit against Apple Inc, alleging it has infringed on its patents. The company is calling for 10 billion yuan ($1.43 billion)in damages and demands that Apple cease "manufacturing, using, promising to sell, selling, and importing" products that infringe on the patent, it said in a social media post. Xiao-i argued that Apple's voice-recognition technology Siri infringes on a patent that it applied for in 2004 and was granted in 2009. Apple did not respond to a request for comment. Reuters was not immediately available to find a copy of the court filing. The lawsuit marks the continuation of a row that has been ongoing for ne...
Silicon Vally based AI Startup Drishti raises $25M in Series B round of funding
FUNDING

Silicon Vally based AI Startup Drishti raises $25M in Series B round of funding

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., June 16, 2020– AI-powered video analytics startup Drishti Technologies raises investment of $25M in Series B round. The round was led by Sozo Ventures, was raised upon demonstrated evidence that Drishti’s AI-powered video analytics, data, and insights bring significant benefits to manufacturers and the people they employ on the factory floor. As part of this round, Uday Sandhu from Alpha Intelligence Capital has joined Drishti’s board of directors. Alpha Intelligence Capital, Toyota AI Ventures, Micron Ventures, Presidio Ventures, HELLA Ventures, as well as current investors Emergence Capital, Benhamou Global Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz, also participated in the round.  Drishti’s Series B financing will fuel its expansion into plants across North A...
California based JIFFY.ai raises $18mn led by Nexus Venture Partners
FUNDING

California based JIFFY.ai raises $18mn led by Nexus Venture Partners

Palo Alto, Calif, Jun 12 2020: Enterprise automation platform JIFFY.ai raises USD 18 million (around Rs 136 crore) in Series A round funding led by Nexus Venture Partners. The funding round also saw participation from Rebright Partners, W250 Venture Fund (founded by alumni of the Stanford Executive Program), and corporate leaders led by Sri Viswanath, Richard Galanti, Charles Goldman, Tony Thomas, Jim Brady, and Bob Ward, a statement said. "Our goal is to set a new standard for business at the intersection of entrepreneurship and innovation. Across our entire team, we''re dedicated to tackling the effects of automation on the workforce, not just by accelerating the path to profit for businesses, but also through our foundation arm, we''ll invest in programmes to re-train and up-skill...
Flatfile Raises $7.6M from Two Sigma Ventures & Google
FUNDING

Flatfile Raises $7.6M from Two Sigma Ventures & Google

DENVER, June 11, 2020-- Flatfile, a drop-in spreadsheet importer raises $7.6 million in funding led by Two Sigma Ventures, with participation from existing investors including Afore Capital, Designer Fund, and Gradient Ventures, Google's AI-focused venture fund. New investors HNVR, Work Life Ventures, Quiet Capital, Basecamp Fund, and Soma Capital also participated in this round. The funding coincides with the launch of Concierge, its newest product focused on data onboarding for large enterprises.  Founded in 2018 by David Boskovic (CEO) and Eric Crane (COO), Flatfile's mission is to remove barriers between humans and data. The company's software products focus specifically on solving the problem of data onboarding, the process businesses use to accept data ...
Anvil Raises $5M from Google and Citi Ventures
FUNDING

Anvil Raises $5M from Google and Citi Ventures

SAN FRANCISCO, June 4, 2020-- Anvil, a paperwork automation platform raises $5 million in Series A investment. Gradient Ventures Google's AI-focused investment fund led the round, with participation from Citi Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Financial Venture Studio, and 122 West. Anvil is a low-code paperwork automation platform that helps businesses quickly build simple online experiences for paperwork processes. Paperwork is at the core of office work in America; every day millions of forms are shared, filled out, signed, and then returned to the requester for processing. The process is insecure, error-prone, tedious, and requires countless human hours to transcribe information from PDFs into various computer systems. Endless forms also waste valuable time and cause frustration ...