Locus Robotics, a Wilmington, MA-based startup, raised $25 million in a Series B funding led by Silicon Valley Scale Venture Partners, with additional participation from existing investors. Locus plans to use the funds to expand into international markets and build up its growing subscription-based robot fleet. Locus business model uses Robots-as-a-Service (RaaS) which allows customers to use Locus' solutions without a large-scale capital investment. The story of how Locus came to be is almost as interesting as why their mobile robots and RaaS business mode are getting so much attention and acceptance. In March 2012, in an effort to make their distribution centers (DCs) as efficient as possible, Amazon acquired Kiva Systems for $775 million and almost immediately took them in-house.

Uber rival Lyft is raising an additional $500 million in funding ion its ongoinjg battle with Uber, according to a U.S. share authorization document filed in Delaware. The additional funding round, led by Alphabet's CapitalG, is an extension of the $1 billion round announced in October. Lyft spokesman Adrian Durbin, confirming the funding round, in an e-mailed statement said, 'Increasing the potential for this round will allow us to further accelerate our commitment to serving passengers and drivers.' The additional funding round, led by Alphabet's CapitalG, is an extension of a $1 billion round announced in October, and raises the firm's valuation to $11.5 billion Axios was first to report the news. In October Lyft had said that the previous round of funding boosted its valuation to $11 billion from $7.5 billion.

Fraugster, a German and Israeli startup that has developed Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology to help eliminate payment fraud, has raised $5 million in funding. Earlybird led the round, alongside existing investors Speedinvest, Seedcamp and an unnamed large Swiss family office. The new capital will be used to add to Fraugster's headcount as it expands internationally. Founded in 2014 by Max Laemmle, who previously co-founded payment gateway company Better Payment, and Chen Zamir, who I'm told has spent more than a decade in different analytics and risk management roles including five years at PayPal, Fraugster says it's already handling almost $15 billion in transaction volume for "several thousand" international merchants and payment service providers, including (and most notably) Visa. Its AI-powered fraud detection technology learns from each transaction in real-time and claims to be able to anticipate fraudulent attacks even before they happen. The result is that Fraugster can reduce fraud by 70 per cent while increasing conversion rates by as much as 35 per cent.

Locus Robotics Corp., whose robots help workers fulfill e-commerce orders, raised $25 million in a funding round led by Scale Venture Partners that the company plans to use to develop new products and expand into new markets. The Wilmington, Mass.-based company makes software and autonomous mobile robots that sync up with warehouse management systems to help workers handle orders more efficiently by taking the fastest routes through aisles to fill orders more quickly. The robots resemble motorized stools with shelving and touchscreens. They operate in groups and use sensors to navigate through warehouses as workers pick items and move on. Locus, whose customers include Deutsche Post AG's DHL Supply Chain, says its technology can double the number of items that workers pick per hour.

Bossa Nova Robotics, a Silicon Valley developer of autonomous service robots for the retail industry, announced the close of a $17.5 million Series B funding round led by Paxion Capital Partners and participation by Intel Capital, WRV Capital, Lucas Venture Group (LVG), and Cota Capital. This round brings Bossa Nova's total funding to date to $41.7 million. Bossa Nova helps large scale stores automate the collection and analysis of on-shelf inventory data by driving their sensor-laden mobile robots autonomously through aisles, navigating safely among customers and store associates. The robots capture images of store shelves and use AI to analyze the data and calculate the status of each product including location, price, and out-of-stocks which is then aggregated and delivered to management in the form of a restock action plan. They recently began testing their robots and analytic services in 50 Walmart stores across the US.

French video game giant Ubisoft has recorded strong revenue in the recent past, thanks to a stable of consistent hits like Rainbow Six: Siege, Ghost Recon: Wildlands and the Assassin's Creed franchise. Even the oddball crossover Mario Rabbids: Kingdom Battle for Nintendo Switch found success earlier this year. But Ubisoft's steady run of success has not saved the company from talk of a possible hostile takeover by fellow French media corporation Vivendi. The good news for Ubisoft: It does not seem like a takeover will happen in the immediate future. Vivendi said it will not attempt a takeover in the next six months.

It also received funding from 83North, Giza and a new investor, Vintage Investment Partners. To date, Logz.io -- which develops artificial intelligence technologies to help companies monitor their networks -- has raised $47 million.

Apple's iPhone X may have only been on sale for a few days, but Apple's plans for its successor are already being analysed. Experts say there are three new iPhones on the way - including Apple's biggest ever phone with a gigantic 6.5 inch screen. All three will abandon the home button in favor of Apple's FaceID system, analyst Ming-Chi Kuo of KGI Securities believes. Is this Apple's 2018 lineup? Experts say there are three new iPhones on the way - including Apple's biggest ever handset with a gigantic 6.5 inch screen.

Machine learning startup Graphcore Ltd. has raised $50 million in new funding in a round led by Sequoia Capital, according to news published Sunday but not yet confirmed by the company itself. It's also not clear what the valuation was on the deal. A report from Bloomberg Nov. 3 said that the company had been chasing a valuation of $1 billion but "wasn't able to reach that height." Founded in 2016, United Kingdom-based Graphcore is building "intelligence processing units," chips that are specifically designed to assist programmers in creating machine learning computer systems that can be used in fields such as with autonomous cars or medical detection devices. The company claims its IPU accelerators and Poplar software framework deliver "the fastest and most flexible platform for current and future machine intelligence applications, lowering the cost of AI in the cloud and datacenter, improving performance and efficiency by between 10x to 100x."

The MPs behind this independent review certainly seem to think so. Culture Secretary Karen Bradley suggested AI has "the potential to improve our everyday lives", while Business Secretary Greg Clark praised the "huge social and economic benefits its use can bring". More than that: they want to make Britain the world leader in AI and add £630bn to the UK economy. With UK productivity having remained largely stagnant since the 2008 financial crisis, we need to start innovating in areas like AI to create bold new ways of working. But to make this work we need more than government reports.