Spain-based AI-powered retail intelligence platform Nextail has landed $10 million in a Series A round led by KEEN Venture Partners LLP, with participation from Sonae IM and existing investor Nauta Capital. The company plans to use the capital injection to further develop its product and double the headcount to over 100 people. Nextail focuses on the sector of fast fashion, where process optimisation is important to bring the most current designs to a store as quickly as possible. It uses AI techniques and prescriptive analytics to provide actionable insights for inventory planning and merchandising. The company claims that its clients see their sales increasing between 5-10 percent, in-store stock coverage reduced by 30 percent and stockouts reduced by 60 percent within the first 30 days of using the platform.

On April 20, 2010, when BP's deep-water drilling rig Deepwater Horizon exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, the oil giant claimed that the spill was just 1,000 barrels per day. A small non-profit in West Virginia, SkyTruth, studied the satellite observations of the oil slick, cataloged its computations, and concluded that the spill was at least 20 times bigger than what was being claimed. The report was quickly picked up by the media, and lead the US government to straightaway increase the estimate to 5,000 barrels of oil per day. The same year, UBS Investment Research had two teams quietly working on Wal-Mart's quarterly earnings preview – one using time-honored traditional methods, the other studying the satellite pictures of the American retail brand's parking lots to gauge the customer footfall. Each came up with a different revenue forecast.

PayPal has acquired its second startup in as many days, as the payments giant announced today that it was snapping up machine learning-powered fraud detection startup Simility. The transaction is valued at $120 million, in what will be an all-cash deal. The news comes two days after PayPal bought out payments startup Hyperwallet in a $400 million deal. Founded in 2014, Palo Alto-based Simility leverages machine learning to help those working in the fraud detection sphere collect and analyze data. The platform is designed to prevent myriad kinds of fraud, such as account takeover (ATO), where a bad actor tries to gain access to another person's online account. In such a scenario, Simility looks at various session, device, and behavioral biometrics and builds a profile for what constitutes "normal" user login behavior; if an anomaly is spotted, it can act to prevent the action.

Kraken Robotics, Inc. (OTCQB: KRKNF) (TSXV: PNG) is engaged as a marine technology company that develops underwater robotic systems and software-centric sensors. Shares of the underwater robotics company are rallying 35%, through early trading on Wednesday, June 20, 2018. Over the past month, Kraken Robotics, Inc. has seen average daily volume of 78,235 shares. However, volume of 155,625 shares or dollar volume of $24,121, has already exchanged hands on the day. Shares of Kraken Robotics, Inc. are climbing today after the company announced that it has received a non-brokered private placement offering with Ocean Infinity, Ltd., an offshore ocean survey and ocean exploration company.

RPA, which covers AI and machine learning capabilities used to handle high-volume, repeatable tasks that once needed humans, is coming. RPA stands for Robotic Process Automation, but don't be confused: it doesn't refer to R2D2, or any of the Kiva robots scurrying around the Amazon warehouse. RPA is language that covers the broad use of software with artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning capabilities to handle high-volume, repeatable tasks that previously required humans to perform. Given the innovation it represents and the pain points it satisfies, RPA is quickly making its way towards a billion dollar revenue market. In recent months alone, leading startups in the space have raised over $300 million for their RPA systems.

Microsoft has announced that it is acquiring Bonsai – an AI startup focused on reinforcement learning – to expand its AI offerings. This move helps Microsoft in expanding its portfolio to autonomous systems and industrial control systems. Bonsai, an artificial intelligence startup based in Berkeley, California, aims to democratize AI by making the technology accessible to business decision makers. It is abstracting the complexity involved in implementing reinforcement learning. Mark Hammond, the co-founder, and CEO of Bonsai is not new to Microsoft.

Bonsai aims to make artificial intelligence technology easier to use in the real world. Microsoft has agreed to acquire Bonsai, a startup focusing on the hot field of artificial intelligence. Bonsai will become part of Microsoft's commercial AI offering through its own Project Brainwave foundation and its Azure cloud computing service, said Gurdeep Pall, Microsoft's corporate vice president of business AI, in a blog post Wednesday. "Bonsai has achieved some remarkable breakthroughs with their approach that will have a profound impact on AI development," he said. AI -- especially areas called machine learning and neural networks -- is an immensely important development in computing.

Microsoft on Wednesday said it has acquired Bonsai, a small artificial intelligence start-up. Terms of the deal weren't disclosed. Microsoft has increasingly bet on AI and has sought to commercialize ideas its own researchers come up with, a strategy also employed by Amazon, Google and other big technology companies. By buying Bonsai, Microsoft gains a product that has picked up some business use to help with the push. Bonsai's software draws on a trendy approach called reinforcement learning, which involves training systems to yield better outcomes through trial and error.

Influential has launched raised $12 million to expand its Social Intelligence platform to find influencers for brands with the help of artificial intelligence. The idea is to match influencers with brands who want to team up with the hottest social media attractions. Using IBM's Watson AI tech, Influential wants to make influencer marketing reach scale on the level that brand marketers need to get measurable results. Beverly Hills, California-based Influential uses three different application programming interfaces for Watson to predict whether Fortune 1000 brands will succeed with particular influencer-based marketing campaigns. Influential's Social Intelligence technology examines factors such as psychographic and contextual relevance for brands to identify their audience, profile, and personality based on social media analysis.

AI startup Wave Computing announced this week that it has acquired MIPS Tech, Inc. (formerly MIPS Technologies), a global leader in RISC processor Intellectual Property (IP) and licensable CPU cores. The acquisition will accelerate Wave's strategy of offering AI acceleration from the Datacenter to the Edge of Cloud by extending the company's products beyond AI systems to now also include AI-enabled embedded solutions. This is a major milestone not only in the history of our two companies, but also for the AI compute industry," said Derek Meyer, CEO of Wave Computing. "With working DPU commercial silicon and being in the final stages of bringing our first AI systems to market, now is the time for us to expand to the Edge of Cloud. The acquisition of MIPS allows us to combine technologies to create products that will deliver a single'Datacenter-to-Edge' platform ideal for AI and deep learning.