Around 47% of the AI companies acquired since 2012 have had VC backing. Corporate giants like Google, IBM, Yahoo, Intel, Apple, and Salesforce are competing in the race to acquire private AI companies, with Ford, Samsung, GE, and Uber emerging as new entrants. Over 250 private companies using AI algorithms across different verticals have been acquired since 2012, with 37 acquisitions taking place in Q1'17 alone. That quarter also saw one of the largest M&A deals: Ford's acquisition of Argo AI for $1B. Baidu has been particularly aggressive in its AI acquisitions in 2017, with 3 M&A deals so far this year, including its acquisition of Amazon Alexa Fund-backed Kitt.ai this quarter.

Security startup Vectra closed a $36 million Series D funding round, bringing its total funding to $123 million. The company will use the latest investment to help build a research and development center in Dublin as it pushes its artificial intelligence (AI)-based platform into the global market. Atlantic Bridge led the Series D round. The Ireland Strategic Investment Fund (ISIF) and Nissho Electronics Corp. also participated along with returning investors Khosla Ventures, Accel Partners, IA Ventures, AME Cloud Ventures, DAG Ventures, and Wipro Ventures. The funding comes as a new report from McAfee, in partnership with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, found cybercrime costs businesses close to $600 billion per year.

Israeli TV to smartphone audio company Tunity has announced a $12 million Series A financing round from existing investors including former Morgan Stanley CEO John Mack and WeWork founder and CEO Adam Neumann, as well as new investors, including MGM Resorts International. Headquartered in New York and with its development center in Tel Aviv, Tunity has developed deep learning and computer vision based technology to produce an app that allows users to stream and hear live audio from muted televisions directly on their smartphones. Tunity will use the funding to complete the development of its data product, which is already attracting significant interest from television networks and advertisers, as well as to enhance its patented cloud-based Deep Learning and Computer Vision technology. Since its launch, the Tunity app has been downloaded more than 1.5 million times, further proving the company's value proposition to consumers through organic adoption and continued usage. After a user scans a nearby television screen, the Tunity app identifies the live video stream and its exact timing, syncing the audio with the user's mobile device.

China and the U.S. are the two countries most closely associated with artificial intelligence (AI) technology, but a startup in Korea is out to add its nation to mix after it raised more than $9 million from some big-name investors. Skelter Labs, which was founded in 2015 by Google's former chief technical officer in Korea, announced today that it has raised KRW 10 billion ($9.3 million). Korean internet and messaging giant Kakao is a major backer, investing in the round via both its'KakaoBrain' AI unit and its K-Cube VC firm, both of which are existing investors. Stonebridge Ventures and Lotte Homeshopping, the TV and internet shopping business owned by multi-billion dollar retail giant Lotte, also participated. Skelter Labs started out as an app development house when it was initially founded by CEO Ted Cho, the former engineering site director at Google Korea, with products that include a flight booking app, chatbot network and point-of-sale software, but, over the past year, it began to focus on AI.

This article originally appeared in the Motley Fool. NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA) stock has been a huge winner in recent years. Since 2016, shares have returned 640%, versus the S&P 500's nearly 40% return. This exceptional performance has left investors hungry for articles about the fast-growing graphics processing unit (GPU) specialist and artificial intelligence (AI) player, which in turn means that financial writers are coming out of the woodwork to meet this demand. If said woodwork was filled only with folks who were both capable of grasping meaty tech topics and willing to do adequate homework before gracing the digital world with their words and analysis, this en masse emergence wouldn't be an issue.

The accurate information: AI is a huge growth driver for NVIDIA's fast-growing data-center platform, which is the company's largest platform by revenue behind gaming. However, AI is not the only growth driver for this platform. Accurate information is easily obtained: At the beginning of every quarterly earnings call, Kress outlines the growth drivers for each of the company's four target market platforms, and oftentimes Huang expounds on this information in the question-and-answer session that follows management's opening remarks. Along with AI, the data-center growth drivers have typically been high-performance computing (HPC) and virtualized computing. Kress did say on the Q4 earnings call that NVIDIA is "starting to see the convergence of HPC and AI," but these are still largely two different things.

In its recently released fourth-quarter and full-year earnings report, NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) showed the world that it could continue to put up blockbuster revenue and earnings numbers. The company grew revenue 34% over the prior-year quarter, while data center revenue based on AI (artificial intelligence) produced triple-digit year-over-year growth for the seventh consecutive quarter. It also beat analysts' estimates on both its top and bottom lines to produce a record-setting quarter. These were just some of the takeaways from the graphics-processing company's solid results. NVIDIA's earnings conference call also gave investors plenty of insight into the future, as the company's management talked cloud computing, deep learning, and self-driving cars.

Judging by our analysis of earnings call transcripts, there's only one hyped mega-trend out there that corporate execs are worried about and that's AI. Big data's time in the corporate consciousness is ending. If you weren't already sure, we've now moved past peak big data. After hitting a high in 2015, the mentions by public company executives of the term "big data" on earnings calls has begun to decline. But nature abhors a vacuum so as one tech buzzword declines, another takes its place.

This story was delivered to BI Intelligence Apps and Platforms Briefing subscribers hours before appearing on Business Insider. To be the first to know, please click here. Chinese internet search giant Baidu credited its solid revenue growth in Q4 2017 to its mobile and artificial intelligence (AI) businesses, according to the company's earnings report. Revenue for the quarter jumped 29% year-over-year (YoY) to reach 23.6 billion yuan ($3.7 billion). In 2017, Baidu refined its focus and began restructuring its resources, shifting them from less profitable ventures to emerging segments such as AI, big data, cloud, and mobile, according to Baidu CEO Robin Yanhong Li.

CommonSense Robotics said its solution enables retailers to shorten the grocery supply chain by transforming underutilized urban retail space into centers where robots will efficiently store, sort and process inventory. This allows retailers to keep their inventory close to customers, not in hangars far removed from cities.