One Concern today announced it has closed a $20 million funding round to "future proof the world," according to a company spokesperson. The funding will be used for research and development to expand One Concern's use of machine learning to predict and mitigate the impact of natural disasters like fires, floods, and hurricanes after they happen. Predictive AI from One Concern called Seismic Concern currently focuses on earthquake preparedness and response. For example, AI models trained with information about building structural integrity and seismic activity is deployed to help cities know where to dispatch emergency workers after an earthquake. Demographics of people impacted, such as age and economic status, are also provided.

DigitalGenius, a fledgling artificial intelligence (AI) startup that's setting out to automate many facets of customer service, has announced a $14.75 million series A funding round led by Global Founders Capital, with participation from Salesforce Ventures, MMC Ventures, Paua Ventures, Kairos, Runa Capital, RRE Ventures, Lumia Capital, Compound, Spider Capital, and Lerer Hippeau Ventures. Founded out of London in 2013, DigitalGenius connects with companies' CRM and customer service platforms to train AI assistants using transcripts from historical customer service interactions. Using these learnings, the AI is able to predict relevant meta-data about a new case in real time, and even channel a query to the most relevant (human) team members based on the content. It's more about helping human customer service personnel respond quickly to queries using historical precedence, so that when a message is received over email, social media, or other text-based messaging platforms, DigitalGenius can suggest the best answer for an agent to approve. In theory, the model should improve with each human interaction.

When DigitalGenius participated in the TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield competition in New York City in 2015, there weren't a lot of companies working on AI and machine learning. Today, it's become much more commonplace, and the company announced a $14.75 million Series A. Global Founders Capital led the round. MMC Ventures, Paua Ventures and several other unnamed new investors also participated They also got help from previous investors Salesforce Ventures, Runa Capital, RRE Ventures, Lumia Capital, Compound and Lerer Hippeau Ventures. Today's investment brings the total to $26 million, according to the company. DigitalGenius may have been ahead of its time, but the market is finally catching up.

There is no force on earth more powerful than an idea whose time has come. Robotic companies continued their two-week pattern of underperformance this week relative to the broader markets. Fully twelve members of the 30 stock Bot Index fell over 3% during the week and drove the Index to a virtual flat performance versus the S & P 500's .35% Four stocks in the health-care sector were among the greatest losers due to a Motley Fool article that focused on competition in the sector. Despite a two for one stock split on December 4th, shares of Cognex traded down over seven percent.

Spanish CRM software company ForceManager has raised $12 million in Series B financing led by AXA Strategic Ventures. Nauta Capital, Sabadell, SIE, and Histemi also participated in the round. ForceManager, based in Barcelona, develops an AI-based sales assistant app for managing and entering data collected on the field. The company claims its system, which operates much like a digital personal assistant, will provide more accurate and intuitive analysis of the data. "This is why AI based systems simply aren't working in the sales industry, especially when it comes to field sales," said CEO Oscar Macia.

Shares of AeroVironment Inc., a drone manufacturer based in Monrovia, soared Wednesday after the company reported strong second-quarter earnings, boosted by a growth in sales of unmanned aircraft systems. AeroVironment stock was up as much as 34% on Wednesday morning before losing some of its gains. It was up 26% at $54.49 around noon Pacific time. The company held its second-quarter earnings call with analysts Tuesday afternoon and reported revenue of $73.8 million, a 47% increase compared with the same period last year. AeroVironment attributed the gain to increased sales of unmanned aircraft systems, which includes drones, on-board cameras and sensors and ground control stations.

A KDDI Corp. employee holds a smartphone to demonstrate the company's augmented reality (AR) voice assistant service at the CEATEC Japan 2017 exhibition in Chiba, Japan. Particularly when it comes to customer experience, money talks. When it comes to money -- the CEO decides. So the priorities of the CEO matters -- because what the CEO focuses on grows. And generally there's a lot of pressure on the CEO from the board to make quarterly dividends. With so much board focus on quarterly profits and growth, it's hard for the CEO to truly focus on customer experience -- which involves long-term investments, or being misunderstood by wall street for long periods of time.

Few weeks after announcing a partnership with Cambridge Judge Business School, and earmarking Rs 200 crore for foraying into Southeast Asian Markets and the Middle East, UpGrad, the online higher education platform, has now announced a partnership with IIIT-Bangalore to launch PG Diploma programme in machine learning and artificial intelligence. The 11-month Post Graduate Diploma programme in machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) is a rigorous and selective PG Diploma Programme which will enable learners in mastering concepts in Machine Learning and AI like classification algorithms, deep learning, natural language processing (NLP), reinforcement learning and graph models amongst others. "Colleges and Universities have in-depth knowledge of technical domains and the latest research happening in these domains. IIIT Bangalore brings a strong understanding of evolving areas like machine learning and AI. Hence such a collaboration will help us bring to the learners, the most recent developments in the field." The curriculum is developed by the IIIT-B faculty and leading industry professionals in Indian technology sector.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning are two phrases that are thrown around a lot in the tech world these days. It has gotten the point where every company has to say they're an AI company, even if they really don't have AI capabilities, just to be taken seriously. The problem is that the best data scientists all want to work for the same few companies: Google, Facebook or Apple. So what are the smaller companies to do? That's the problem that H2O.ai is solving.

Uber's growing string of scandals almost certainly played a role in the discounted valuation. The most recent problem was made public on Tuesday in a federal courtroom in San Francisco. Federal prosecutors are investigating allegations that Uber deployed an espionage team to plunder trade secrets from its rivals. The revelation triggered a delay in a high-profile trial over whether the beleaguered ride-hailing service stole self-driving car technology from a Google spinoff.