business
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Billionaires make it rain on Plenty, the indoor farming startup
SoftBank Vision Fund, the huge tech-investment vehicle helmed by Japanese billionaire Masayoshi Son, has led a $200 million investment into indoor farming startup Plenty. Joining Son are notable tech billionaires Eric Schmidt and Jeff Bezos. Plenty farms can grow anything except tree fruit and root vegetables, and produce crops at yields 530x greater than a typical field. Read More
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Clara Labs nabs $7M Series A as it positions its AI assistant to meet the needs of enterprise teams
Clara Labs is announcing a $7 million Series A led by Basis Set Ventures. Slack Fund also joined in the round, alongside existing investors Sequoia and First Round. The startup will be looking to further differentiate within the crowded field of email-centric personal assistants by building in features and integrations to address the needs of enterprise teams. Read More
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Reach Robotics closes $7.5M Series A for its augmented reality bots
After years of research and development, Reach Robotics has closed a $7.5 million Series A, co-led by Korea Investment Partners (KiP) and IGlobe, to bring its augmented reality bots to market in a big way. The Bristol-based startup is looking to expand into the U.S., and the team is exploring opportunities for growth into other European and Asian markets. Read More
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Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check
IBM’s Watson unit is receiving heat today in the form of a scathing equity research report from Jefferies’ James Kisner. The group believes that IBM’s investment into Watson will struggle to return value to shareholders. In recent years, IBM has increasingly leaned on Watson as one of its core growth units — a unit that sits as a proxy for projecting IBM’s… Read More
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Here are the winners of the Google Cloud machine learning pitch-off
Back in March at Google’s Cloud Next conference, the company announced plans to run its own machine learning startup competition side-by-side with Data Collective and Emergence Capital. Four months later, 10 startups, pulled from a pool of 350+ applicants, presented onstage at Google’s Launchpad Space in San Francisco. The startups vied for three prizes; here are the winners. Read More
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Pendo closes $25M Series C from Meritech to scale its customer understanding platform
Just seven months after announcing a $20 million Series B, Pendo, a platform to help businesses better understand their customers, has closed a new $25 million Series C led by Meritech Capital Partners. The North Carolina-based startup has been growing at a rapid clip — ballooning to 106 employees across offices in San Francisco, New York and Raleigh. Read More
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Datatron raises $2.7M to help companies query real-time and historical data
Fresh out of 500 startups, Datatron has raised $2.7 million in seed financing for its data-savvy assistant, Emma. But under the somewhat trite coating of an assistant, Datatron is making it easier for employees to gather insights from the complex web of historical and real-time data. Read More
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Abstract launches as the versioning system of record for design
Sales teams have Salesforce. Engineers have GitHub. But designers have always had slim pickings. Abstract, launching today, is a workflow platform and system of record built for designers to solve the debilitating frustrations of the design process. The company is targeting Sketch users out of the gate, with ambitions to accommodate the whole gamut of visual file types. Read More
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Outside of AI, companies are doing less research and more development
If you’ve been following the headlines in the world of AI, you might be fooled into thinking that corporations are doubling down, rather than withdrawing, from pure research. But on the ground, things are considerably more complicated — tech companies are spending more on the development part of R&D while relying more on cash strapped universities to move the needle on… Read More
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Adobe releases analytics tools for conversational AI
It’s still hard to say if the voice-controlled aluminum can will be the next smartphone or the next Segway, but either way, brands are preparing. This morning Adobe launched a new set of analytics tools, Adobe Sensei for Voice, to help brands take advantage of conversational data to improve targeting and, ideally, conversions.
Adobe says it can consume data from Alexa, Siri, Google… Read More
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