Over 25 companies raised equity funding rounds in the last quarter. Deal activity was up 7x from Q1'11.
Deal activity in artificial intelligence has now hit record highs for two quarters straight.
Deal count had already leapt to 24 in Q4’15, ten more deals than the previous quarter. The trend continued in Q1’16, with deals reaching a 5-year quarterly high, and passing the 25-deal threshold.
However, total funding dropped 18% to $83M from $101M in Q4’15, when over 20 companies raised funds.
The field of artificial intelligence has experienced a striking spurt of progress in recent years, with software becoming much better at understanding images, speech, and new tasks such as how to play games. Now the company whose hardware has underpinned much of that progress has created a chip to keep it going.
A few years ago, a breakthrough in machine learning suddenly enabled computers to recognize objects shown in photographs with unprecedented—almost spooky—accuracy. The question now is whether machines can make another leap, by learning to make sense of what’s actually going on in such images.
After several decades in the doldrums, AI is experiencing quite a renaissance. In recent years, amazing progress has been made using so-called deep learning, training algorithms with large amounts of data so that they can recognize subtle patterns. Such approaches have enabled computers to recognize faces in an image or the text of speech, often with eerily human accuracy.
MedyMatch Technology bills itself as an artificial intelligence healthcare startup. It’s applying AI in the form of “deep vision and advanced cognitive analytics” to the analysis of medical imaging scans to help radiologists or emergency department physicians recognise hard to spot abnormalities and in turn make better decisions.
To further develop and market its tech, the Tel Aviv and Boston-based company has raised a $2 million seed round from several private and institutional investors. These include Genesis Capital Advisors, and Exigent Alternative Capital.
Diffbot, an artificial intelligence company that helps clients extract and combine data from multiple Web sources, announced today it raised $10 million from investors including Tencent and Felicis Ventures to expand its “knowledge-as-a-service” offerings to businesses and consumer apps.
Advancements in AI were recently spotlighted by AlphaGo, a computer program developed by Google’s DeepMind team. The program — which relies on decision-making algorithms and neural networks — defeated a human European champion at the board game Go in a feat previously believed to be years away.
On the investor side, Jim Breyer of Breyer Capital has said AI will deliver massive returns for investors betting on applications for industries including healthcare and entertainment.
Uno de los puntos fuertes de DLD es que, por su proximidad a Davos, acuden a esta conferencia algunos de los gurús que después se van a Suiza a predecir el futuro. Este año había unos cuantos platos fuertes en este ámbito, como Jeremy Rifkin y Albert Wenger, que coincidieron en muchas cosas en torno al futuro del trabajo. Veamos.
According to researchers, 2016 will be the year of AI. Believed to be replacing the screen age as one of the “hot consumer trends,” the latest in AI allows for much more than robots, personal assistants, and self-driving cars.
Facebook recently announced that the company is open-sourcing its Big Sur servers designed for deep learning (i.e. voice, image, and language recognition). The move comes as no surprise. Google, IBM, and Microsoft already took decisive steps towards opening their AI technologies earlier this year.
