AI is one of the hottest sectors, with its technology promising to revolutionize and automate every industry imaginable. Even AI-enabled applications can bring the next major disruption within enterprise software. While AI is still in its early stage, people across the globe are interacting with it either directly or indirectly on a daily basis via virtual assistants, facial-recognition technology, gaming platforms, chatbots, mapping applications, and a host of other software. As developments in AI accelerate, companies are looking to expand their offerings by attracting investments or series funding. Hence, this makes a perfect time for startups to find investors to further their projects and plans. Here are some key AI investments acquired by startups over the first half of October.
Founded in 2018, this Pittsburgh-based startup company has combined a consumer app with artificial intelligence to securely transcribe any medical conversation that a patient chooses to record. Abridge, which announced its official launch and $15 million in funding on October 6, already has 50,000 users, mainly garnered through word-of-mouth.
Abridge aims to bridge the gap between patients and clinicians—by helping them understand the details of the patient's health from the high-level care plan down to the details of diagnoses, procedures, or medications discussed. This is what attracted lead investor Union Square Ventures. Bessemer Venture Partners and the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center also participated in the Series A round.
Founded in 2015, this Trivandrum-based robotics startup is widely known for making Bandicoot, the fully automated maintenance hole cleaning robots. It has already been working with the Centre and State Governments to help eradicate manual scavenging from India.
Genrobotics has raised INR2.5 crore in a pre-Series A round led by existing investors Unicorn India Ventures. Anand Mahindra, who has invested in his personal capacity, has also joined as a new investor in this round along with SEA Fund. The startup said the funds raised would be used for further scaling up production of Bandicoot to meet the growing demand in light of eradicating manual scavenging and develop new products and R&D to leverage the technology for the healthcare segment.
This Israel- and Mumbai-based startup is a provider of ML-powered log analytics and monitoring solution. It provides local customers with local Amazon Web Services (AWS) regional server support and data storage capabilities. On October 8, Coralogix announced that it had raised a $25 million Series B funding round, bringing the company's total amount raised to $41.2 million. This funding and new analytics solution can help expand Coralogix's local presence and help better support its local customers. The startup's newly launched analytics solution challenges the cost model of observability by allowing customers to pay according to data priority instead of solely on volume. It does this via re-engineering the Elasticsearch engine that enables it to offer queries, alerts, and its ML capabilities without the use of storage.
This payment automation solutions provider raised $150 million at an over $2 billion valuation on October 6. The company says it will devote the funds to increasing the size of its developer, product management, customer operations, sales, and business development teams.
Tipalti leverages AI algorithms to reduce risks and errors while uncovering workflows that could be streamlined. This AI can identify things like bill and invoice entries, form validations, and data entry. It also works in the background to learn approval routing and how to record bill fields for line-level charges.
This is actually a Silicon Valley spirits company that has developed a new data-driven process to accelerate the aging of whiskey and create specific flavors. It uses a machine learning-based approach, which it calls its ACTivation technology, to minimize the time it takes to age these spirits, which is typically done in wooden barrels. On October 7, the company successfully raised a $2.6 million seed funding round. Investors include Clos de la Tech owner T.J. Rodgers and baseball's Derek Jeter.
Founded in 2012, this dental robotics startup closed a US$72 million round of funding on October 8. The new investors are DFJ Growth and Vivo Capital. Neocis's Yomi is the only robot cleared by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for dental implant surgery. At present, it is currently employed at two dental schools — Boston University and the school at West Virginia University. Using the Yomi robot, which features a robotic arm that extends outward from a moveable base, has haptic guidance, dentists don't need to be quite so invasive with their surgery and can implant teeth more quickly and with less risk of complications from extensive surgeries.
Neocis says Yomi's AI support prevents drill deviation or over-drilling past specific depths from avoiding hitting anatomy like nerves and sinus cavities, even if the patient moves.
This 2017 founded biotech company uses AI and Machine learning to reveal drug targets that emerge from cell-cell interactions and drive novel antibody-drug discovery for challenging diseases like cancer. The startup aims to use technology to address barriers to drug discovery that arise with the tumor stroma.
On October 7, it announced the official launch of the company with US$6 million seed financing. The financing was led by CTI Life Sciences Fund and joined by AV8 Ventures, Luminous Ventures, and Viva BioInnovator. The funding will be used to support preclinical studies for two validated cancer drug targets discovered with Phenomic AI's platform, as well as discover and advance additional drug targets into the company's pipeline.
Founded in 2015, this London based startup uses AI and machine learning, along with nutritional expertise, to match products with consumer preferences and requirements. Its health & wellness platform analyses products' nutritional values and ingredients, allocating appropriate nutritional tags.
Earlier this month, the company secured a series A funding round with W23, netting AU$4 million from the venture capital arm of Australia's largest retailer, Woolworths Group. This financial aid will help to expand its footprint with retailers across the Asia Pacific, North America, and Europe. Spoon Guru will also use the funds to drive product innovation in-store and online.
This year, the company unveiled an 'Immunity Support Tag' in response to increased consumer demand for immunity-boosting foods amid the escalating coronavirus pandemic. The tag was said to make it easier for consumers to locate immune system-strengthening foods online, or through physical labels and aisle markers in-store.
This NYC-based company enables companies of all sizes to train state-of-the-art AI models on hundreds of cloud GPUs and TPUs. William Falcon, the inventor of the popular open-source PyTorch Lightning project, co-founded this startup with Luis Capelo to help machine learning engineers work more efficiently. On October 8, it announced raising an $18.6 million Series A funding round, which closed earlier this summer. The round was led by Index Ventures, with participation from Bain Capital Ventures and firstminute. With this funding, Grid plans to expand its team and strengthen its corporate offering via both Grid AI and through the open-source project.
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