Covariant today announced the close of a $40 million series B funding round to bring its robotic control systems to additional industries and create more systems capable of picking, placing, and unloading objects in warehouses. Until now, Covariant has focused its efforts on ecommerce picking robots in highly automated warehouses. It may be best known for its work in robotic grasping, the task of picking up objects with a robotic hand or gripper. The startup -- whose founders who met at OpenAI and University of California, Berkeley -- has raised $67 million, to date. After emerging from stealth earlier this year with support from deep learning luminaries like Geoffrey Hinton, Jeff Dean, and Yann LeCun, Covariant stated that the Covariant Brain system is capable of picking and packing some 10,000 items with 99% accuracy. Robotics manufacturer ABB signed a partnership with Covariant in February, following a picking and sorting test held by ABB last year in which Covariant outperformed 20 other systems.

Everyone is talking about artificial intelligence (AI) right now- with many predicting that AI will lead the next wave of economic growth and productivity for the next couple of decades at least. AI refers to the use of data to simulate human intelligence processes including learning, reasoning and self-correction by machines. AI is making its way into almost every industry. With IDC predicting that worldwide spending on AI will be nearly $98 Billion in 2023, the implications of this technology are massive. And this has not been ignored by Wall Street. Analysts say that plenty of compelling investments can be found within this space.

Ford said Tuesday it will delay until 2022 plans to launch an autonomous vehicle service, as the COVID-19 pandemic has prompted the company to rethink its go-to-market strategy. The news was shared as part of Ford's quarterly earnings, which was released after the market closed Tuesday. Ford reported a $2 billion loss in the first quarter compared to a profit of $1.1 billion in the same period last year. The company warned that losses during the second quarter will widen as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to disrupt its business. Ford is a bit different from other companies that have launched autonomous vehicle pilots in the United States.

The COVID-19 pandemic is creating many problems for the car industry, and that extends to Ford's self-driving taxis. While discussing its quarterly earnings, the company revealed that its autonomous vehicle services have been delayed from 2021 to 2022. In a statement to TechCrunch, it said it needed to "evaluate" the effect of COVID-19 on customer behavior and potentially change its strategy. It also wanted to offer future users "peace of mind" knowing that they and their packages would be safe. Ford COO Jim Farley warned during the earnings call that the pandemic could influence society for "many years to come," with people seeking out more ways to avoid unnecessary human contact.

Signalling the resistance of the robotic process automation market despite a poorly performing economy, RPA solutions provider Blue Prism announced that it has raised over $124 million in equity financing at a valuation of around $1.24 billion. According to CEO Jason Kingdon, a bulk of the capital will go into bolstering the company's automation suite. Just last month, Blue Prism had launched a COVID-19 response task team to perform a variety of functions. This team has been working with the UK's National Health Service, University of California, and the Leeds Building Society to automate personnel, vaccine development, finance, and related health care support functions. "Our RPA solution is more important than ever in this environment," Kingdon said in a report. "The impact of this pandemic is unknown, and as a result, we are taking action to invest and reinforce our product differentiation in preparation for the opportunities that will occur," he added.

Plano, TX - April 15, 2020 - CollabNet VersionOne, XebiaLabs, and Arxan Technologies today announced their combination and strategic transformation to Digital.ai, a new software company that brings together leaders in business agility, software delivery, and application security into one integrated, intelligent value stream platform. Backed by TPG Capital, Digital.ai is on a mission to revolutionize how enterprises create, measure, deliver, secure, and continuously improve digital products that provide value, fuel revenue growth, and enable innovation in today's rapidly changing world. The Digital.ai Value Stream Platform seamlessly integrates all the disparate tools and processes across value streams, uses data and AI/ML to create connective tissue between them, and provides enterprises with the real-time, contextual insights they need to drive and sustain their digital transformation and produce great business outcomes. By streamlining processes across teams and providing continuous feedback loops throughout the development lifecycle, organizations can focus on what matters most to drive efficiencies, reduce costs, and create meaningful value for customers. "In these challenging times, your digital presence is your business. Digital.ai enables enterprises to focus on business outcomes instead of outputs, unifying value creation, delivery, and protection practices to drive efficiencies and create engaging, secure digital experiences that customers value and trust," said Ashok Reddy, CEO of Digital.ai.

Equity research analysts at financial institutions play a pivotal role in capital markets; they provide an efficient conduit between investors and companies' management and facilitate the efficient flow of information from companies, promoting functional and liquid markets. However, previous research in the academic finance and behavioral economics communities has found that analysts' estimates of future company earnings and other financial quantities can be affected by a number of behavioral, incentive-based and discriminatory biases and systematic errors, which can detrimentally affect both investors and public companies. We propose a Bayesian latent variable model for analysts' systematic errors and biases which we use to generate a robust bias-adjusted consensus estimate of company earnings. Experiments using historical earnings estimates data show that our model is more accurate than the consensus average of estimates and other related approaches.

SoftBank Group Corp. fell as much as 10 percent after a provider of satellite-based internet service that it invested in filed for bankruptcy, ceding some gains from an unprecedented plan to sell assets and buy back shares. OneWeb made the filing late Friday U.S. time after raising about $3.3 billion in debt and equity financing from shareholders including SoftBank, Airbus SE and Qualcomm Inc. since its inception. At least $1 billion of that came from SoftBank, which said it first invested in December 2016 and declined to give a total amount. It is the latest blow to SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son, who last week unveiled a plan to raise $41 billion to buy back shares and slash debt. The announcement sent the shares soaring more than 50 percent in just a few days.