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.

The biggest acquisition in the history of technology has been tabled. Broadcom, which itself was purchased by Singapore's Avago Technologies in 2016, has made a $130 billion bid for rival chipmaker Qualcomm. If it goes through (and that's a big if), Broadcom would be paying 20 times the amount Candy Crush-maker King was purchased for, or more than 130 times the amount it cost Facebook to buy Instagram. It could even get the equivalent of five LinkedIns for the price. The proposed deal is so big it's nearly double the biggest tech buyout of all time, Dell's $67bn buyout of EMC in 2015. Broadcom's purchase of Qualcomm would make the company dominant in the chipmaking industry.

Nvidia reported a stellar quarter for the three months ended October 31. Nvidia had $2.6 billion in revenue in the quarter, and $1.5 billion of it came from graphics chips for gaming PCs. But the company's investment in artificial intelligence chips is paying off, with data center growing beyond $500 million in revenue for the first time. Jensen Huang, CEO of Santa Clara, California-based Nvidia, said his company started investing in AI seven years ago, and that its latest AI chips are the result of years of work by several thousand engineers. That has given the company an edge in AI, and other rivals are scrambling to keep up, he said.

The company, founded in 2012, initially focused on consumer electronics devices such as headphones. The new artificial intelligence product, similar to Apple's Siri and Amazon's Alexa, marks a sharp departure for the firm, which now employs about 300 people. Its most recent funding round, an $89 million investment by a group including Salesforce Ventures, closed in March but had not been previously announced. Will.i.am, who rose to prominence as a member of The Black Eyed Peas, said the corporate market offered the company an opportunity to quickly deploy and develop its assistant, called Omega. "I wanted to create something that allows us to do many things," said will.i.am,