Chorus.ai, a startup that uses AI (artificial intelligence) to analyze sales calls, announced today that it has raised $16 million. The round was led by Redpoint Ventures. The San Francisco- and Tel Aviv-based startup provides a software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering that uses in-house developed speech recognition, natural language processing (NLP), and AI to transcribe, analyze, and deliver real-time feedback on sales conversations. The aim is to improve sales rep performance and help companies understand why some deals don't close. "Studies show that win rates increase by 33 percent with a proper coaching program in place, yet most managers don't have the time to sit in on calls, and no one has the capacity to learn from the thousands of meetings that take place each quarter," said Roy Raanani, CEO and cofounder of Chorus.ai, in a statement.

Tim Cook had indicated a lot of developments from Apple in his quarterly earnings call last week. He indicated that the company's flagship smartphone, the iPhone still had much more technological evolution to go for. Here is the range of products that the Apple CEO talked about and based on how they are expected to develop in 2017. "I think the smartphone is still in the early innings of the game," Cook said about the iPhone. Could this be an indication of some new technological changes coming to the device so as to keep it in "the game?" Apple generally launches just one phone per year compared to its competitors such as Samsung and LG, which have devices at various price ranges and have round the year launches.

This quarterly earnings report is not subject to the quarterly review procedures in accordance with the Financial Instruments and Exchange Act. At the time of disclosure of this quarterly earnings report, the review procedures for quarterly financial statements in accordance with the Financial Instruments and Exchange Act are incomplete. The earnings forecasts are based on information currently available to the Company at the time of the release of these materials. Actual business results may differ from the forecasts due to various factors. For information regarding the assumptions on which earnings forecasts are based and points to note when using the earnings forecasts, please refer to "(3) Information regarding consolidated earnings forecasts and other forward-looking statements" under "1. Supplementary material on quarterly earnings will be available on the Company's website, on Friday, January 27, 2017.

SoundHound has been around for 10 years and, before today, had raised around $40 million in financing as its worked to build a massive conversational AI platform. But today, the company is adding an even more cash to that pile, nearly doubling the amount that it's already raised with a $75 million round including strategic investors like NVIDIA and Samsung Catalyst Fund, among others.

Clarifai, a startup that creates visual recognition software, has hired four members of Twitter's machine learning team, Cortex, as well as an engineer formerly with Google Brain, the search giant's research group focused on artificial intelligence. Founded in 2013 by computer science PhD Matthew Zeiler after he did an internship with the Google research team, Clarifai licenses customizable software that can automatically organize and filter images. The startup's clients include BuzzFeed, travel site Trivago and consumer-packaged goods giant Unilever. The 40-employee startup (including new hires) has raised $41 million, including $30 million in a Series B round led by Menlo Ventures. The round included contributions from Union Square Ventures, Lux Capital and Qualcomm Ventures.

A group of self driving Uber vehicles position themselves to take journalists on rides during a media preview at Uber's Advanced Technologies Center in Pittsburgh (Photo: Gene J. Puskar, AP) Ride-hailing service Uber and Daimler, the parent company of Mercedes-Benz, announced a partnership Thursday to work together on future self-driving cars. The goal would be to produce cars that can run on Uber's ride-hailing network. In a statement announcing the partnership, Uber's CEO Travis Kalanick didn't give a timeframe, only saying the program would be operational "in the coming years." Uber has been one of the most aggressive companies in trying to develop self-driving cars, envisioning the time when driverless cars prowl the streets of major cities picking up and dropping off passengers. "By opening up the Uber platform to Daimler, we can get to the future faster than going it alone," stated Kalanick.

GoPro CEO Nick Woodman introduces the foldable Karma drone during a press event in Olympic Valley, Calif. in September. Six days after the release of GoPro's first-ever drone in October, Brian Warholak was itching to get airborne. As an employee at a Chesapeake, Va.-based government contractor, Warholak, 43, had few opportunities during the workweek to fly his new toy. But on Friday, he left his desk early, unpacked his GoPro Karma from its carrying case and set it on a manicured lawn near the company parking lot. In the video of Warholak's aeronautic excursion, the drone lurches upward, pausing for its master to pan the attached camera.

Distributed denial of service protection firm Radware Ltd. has acquired cloud-based security firm Seculert for an undisclosed sum. Founded in 2012, Seculert offers a software-as-a-service security platform that aims to fill gaps left by legacy perimeter defense and breach detection systems. It claims to protect enterprises from advanced threats by focusing on malicious outbound network traffic. The company's platform combines big data analytics, machine learning technology and behavioral analysis to provide visibility on the final two stages of the malware kill chain. Seculert's Javelin service is claimed to be the first inside-out attack simulation and remediation service that allows enterprises to determine how well their secure web gateway, next-generation firewalls or proxy would do at preventing real world malicious malware attacks from succeeding in communicating with their perpetrator's command and control servers.

The Chan Zuckerberg Inititative, a philanthropic initiative from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Dr. Priscilla Chan, a pediatrician, has acquired a startup, Meta, focused on using AI and machine learning to sift through recently published scientific studies. The terms of the acquisition were undisclosed. Announced in September, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is a limited liability company focused on the ambitious goal to "cure, prevent, or manage all diseases by the end of the century." At least $3 billion will be allocated toward that goal, all coming out of Chan and Zuckerberg's Facebook shares. "In science, peer-reviewed articles are the medium for the global conversation among researchers, and they represent the foundational reference point by which we judge what is known, where science is going, and what to work on next," Meta CEO Sam Molyneux, who cofounded the startup with his sister Amy, wrote in a blog post announcing the acquisition. Each day, more than 4,000 scientific papers are published in biomedicine alone.

BNP Paribas Securities Services has acquired a minority stake in Fortia Financial Solutions. This deal helps Fortia, a start-up that provides compliance software to the financial services industry, cement the relationship it formed with the bank during the inaugural session of the fintech accelerator by L'Atelier BNP Paribas. Fortia's marquee product, the Innova software platform, comprises eight modules that use machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) to help manage, process, control and understand data. The solutions are tailored to help companies monitor risk, analyse data, manage AML and KYC requirements, and provide support for overall investment compliance. "Fortia's Innova solution tackles two very real challenges for financial services companies and institutional investors – growing regulatory requirements and mounting volumes of data – by applying new technologies in an intelligent and innovative way," says Jean Devambez, global head of product and client solutions, asset and fund services, at BNP Paribas Securities Services.