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.

BEIJING (Reuters) - Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) startup SenseTime Group said on Wednesday it has sealed an investment from chipmaker Qualcomm Inc as part of a funding round that will close later this year. SenseTime and Qualcomm had announced a strategic tie last month to collaborate on AI, which will see SenseTime's proprietary algorithms deployed in smart devices. Qualcomm, in a statement, confirmed the investment in SenseTime. The two firms did not disclose the size of the investment. Reuters reported earlier in November that SenseTime plans to raise about $500 million in a new funding round, in what would be the biggest ever such fundraising by an AI startup.

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.