Collaborate Disseminate
In an unsurprising move by credit card thieves, police have found a new credit card skimmer that sends stolen data via SMS. By tearing apart cheap phones, crooks are able to send credit card information to their location instantly without having … Continue reading Gas pump card skimmer now phones home
Clara Labs, creator of the Clara AI assistant, is announcing a $7 million Series A this morning 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… Read More Continue reading Clara Labs nabs $7M Series A as it positions its AI assistant to meet the needs of enterprise teams
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 Continue reading Jefferies gives IBM Watson a Wall Street reality check
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 Continue reading Here are the winners of the Google Cloud machine learning pitch-off
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 Continue reading Pendo closes $25M Series C from Meritech to scale its customer understanding platform
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 a making it easier for employees to gather insights from the comple… Continue reading Datatron raises $2.7M to help companies query real-time and historical data
Lyft now makes it easier for business travelers to expense the trips they take for work – rides taken under a Business Profile within the Lyft app can now be automatically forwarded to a number of expense management systems, including Expensify, Chrome River, Concur, Nexonia, Zoho, Abacus and Xpenditure. The auto forwarding basically just takes a step out of the process, but it’s a… Read More Continue reading Lyft adds automatic ride receipt forwarding for business profiles
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 Continue reading Outside of AI, companies are doing less research and more development
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 Continue reading Adobe releases analytics tools for conversational AI
OpenDoor, Oscar Health, Palantir and now Merlon Intelligence. Bradford Cross, founder of the venture capital firm Data Collective is joining the ranks of VCs who have caught the entrepreneurship bug, abandoning a cushy lifestyle for one with considerably more volatility. His latest startup, Merlon Intelligence, services banks, helping them cut down on risk and put a stop to money laundering. Read More Continue reading Merlon Intelligence raises $7.65 million in seed financing to combat money laundering