BeyondMinds today announced a $15 million funding round led by Check Point cofounder Marius Nacht. The company, which is based in Tel Aviv and New York, says it will devote the bulk of these funds to sales and product R&D as it expands its customer base. The benefits of AI and machine learning can feel intangible at times, but surveys show this hasn’t kept enterprises from adopting the…

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 Hangouts, and people can have conversations with her that will seem realistic because she can draw upon sophisticated memory and…

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…

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…