AI-powered grocery management platform Afresh today raised $13 million in funding, which a source tells VentureBeat values the company at over $100 million. Afresh says the capital will enable it to expand its product across supply chain, store operations, and merchandising for all food categories, following a year in which it doubled the size of its workforce.
Grocery stores are responsible for…
Google’s Project Guideline uses AI to help low-vision users navigate running courses
November 26, 2020
In collaboration with nonprofit organization Guiding Eyes for the Blind, Google today piloted an AI system called Project Guideline, designed to help blind and low-vision people run races independently with just a smartphone. Using an app that tracked the virtual race via…
Though humans historically provided concierge services for commercial buildings, guiding visitors to their destinations and answering questions, artificial intelligence and computer vision have advanced to the stage where fully digital alternatives can offer the same or…
Canvas emerges from stealth with AI for drywall installation
November 26, 2020
Canvas, a company that uses machine learning to install drywall at construction sites, emerged from stealth today. Canvas was founded in 2017 and uses a modified JLG lift, robotic arm, and sensors to automate drywall installation.
Once that task is perfected, Canvas plans to expand into areas like painting and spray-on insulation. The company focuses on commercial construction sites larger than…
Fable Studio won an Emmy Award for its Wolves in the Walls virtual reality project. Now it’s relaunching Lucy, a next-generation AI character, to have conversations in the wider world.
Lucy will soon be available on social platforms such as Zoom, Facebook, and Google…
Forter raises $125 million at a $1.3 billion valuation to combat ecommerce fraud with AI
November 26, 2020
Forter, an automated fraud detection platform for ecommerce, has raised $125 million in a series E round that values the company at over $1.3 billion.
The raise comes as ecommerce transactions surge under pandemic-driven lockdowns. But the throngs of people jumping online to…
Deepfence nabs $9.5 million to build AI shields for cloud workloads
November 26, 2020
Deepfence, a startup developing a cybersecurity platform focused on protecting cloud-native workloads, today nabbed $9.5 million in funding. The 10-employee company says this investment follows a year in which its revenues and customer base more than doubled.
Some 20% of organizations get hit with cyberattacks six or more times a year, and 80% say they’ve experienced at least one incident in the…
What enterprise CISOs need to know about AI and cybersecurity
November 26, 2020
Hari Sivaraman is the Head of AI Content Strategy at Venturebeat.
Modern day enterprise security is like guarding a fortress that is being attacked on all fronts, from digital infrastructure to applications to network endpoints.
That complexity is why AI technologies…
ControlUp, a startup leveraging AI to help IT teams remediate problems with on-premise, hybrid, and cloud infrastructure, today raised $27 million in funding. The company says the investment will enable it to expand its platform and market presence to monitor user…
Researchers in China say they’ve created sarcasm detection AI that achieved state-of-the-art performance on a dataset drawn from Twitter. The AI uses multimodal learning that combines text and imagery since both are often needed to understand whether a person is being sarcastic.
The researchers argue that sarcasm detection can assist with sentiment analysis and crowdsourced understanding of…
