Customer and partner expansion and industry recognition signal rapid adoption of company's sales and learning platform together with funding led by General Catalyst Allego, the sales learning and coaching platform, today announced the close of a strong quarter, in which the company added key new customers, renewed 100 percent of its existing customer base and garnered solid industry recognition for its mobile-friendly sales learning platform. Allego also announced it has closed a $7.5M investment led by General Catalyst. "Partnering with visionary sales and training leaders and our team's focus on ensuring their success continued to drive great results for both Allego and our customers in the first half of 2018" "Partnering with visionary sales and training leaders and our team's focus on ensuring their success continued to drive great results for both Allego and our customers in the first half of 2018," said Yuchun Lee, CEO and co-founder of Allego. "We're excited to see the modern learning paradigm -- characterized by easily created and absorbed content, provided continuously and in bite-sized pieces, with reinforcement and support for informal learning -- rapidly gaining traction across sales training and corporate L&D." As it has since inception, Allego continues to fund its growth through positive operating cash flow.

In the broad sweep of AI's current worldly ambitions, machine learning healthcare applications seem to top the list for funding and press in the last three years. Since early 2013, IBM's Watson has been used in the medical field, and after winning an astounding series of games against with world's best living Go player, Google DeepMind's team decided to throw their weight behind the medical opportunities of their technologies as well. Many of the machine learning (ML) industry's hottest young startups are knuckling down significant portions of their efforts to healthcare, including Nervanasys(recently acquired by Intel), Ayasdi (raised $94MM as of 02/16), Sentient.ai With all the excitement in the investor and research communities, we at TechEmergence have found most machine learning executives have a hard time putting a finger on where machine learning is making its mark on healthcare today. We've written this article, not to be a complete catalogue of possible applications, but to highlight a number of current and future uses of machine learning in the medical field, with relevant links to external sources and related TechEmergence interviews. The list below is by no means complete, but provides a useful lay-of-the-land of some of ML's impact in the healthcare industry.

Shanghai-based computer vision company Yitu announced today that it has acquired an additional US$100 million in funding, with China Industrial Asset Management as the sole investor this round. Yitu is one of China's four AI unicorns, along with Face, Cloudwalk and SenseTime. On June 12th, 2018, Yitu completed its C Round with US$200 Million from GC Capital, ICBC International, and SPDB International. This new funding raises Yitu's valuation to over US$2.3 billion. Yitu was found in 2012 and focuses on computer vision, natural language processing, knowledge reasoning, intelligent hardware, and robotics.

Earlier this month, Aaron Levie, CEO of Box teased of new growth at the end of 2018 and some small acquisitions in the future. He mentioned that the company had plans to invest more into core technologies, like artificial intelligence, security and workflow. "We might make small acquisitions ourselves in terms of growing that technology. We are very confident in the position we occupy and just want to expand that from there," and so they did! With the recent acquisition of Butter.ai, a startup that helps customers search for content across all business applications powered by machine learning.

This is the tech news you need to know this Thursday. News of this deal comes just four months after President Trump blocked Broadcom from acquiring chipmaker Qualcomm in a $103 billion hostile takeover on national security grounds. The new terms give Facebook explicit permission to audit developers' use of data, in what looks an effort to prevent a second Cambridge Analytica-style scandal. Musk was responding to a Twitter user who said he had been told Musk wouldn't be able to help bring clean water to Flint. According to an excerpt of the account in Vanity Fair, employees feared Brin's behaviour would lead to a sexual harassment lawsuit.

This article was written by Kwon Sok Oh, a Financial Analyst at I Know First. NVIDIA Corp. (NASDAQ: NVDA) is the leading designer and manufacturer of graphics processing units and related products and services. It's main operating segments are the GPU segments and the Tegra Processor segment. NVIDIA currently has 11,528 employees with $9.71 billion in revenue in 2017. It is headquartered in Santa Carla, CA.

Microsoft wants partners to put more focus into delivering the artificial-intelligence (AI) capabilities offered in its data platform and cloud portfolios. The company doesn't feel enough of its partners currently offer AI holistically to enable customers to transform their businesses. Setting the stage for how Microsoft might help enable partners to do that, the company recently announced a partnership with Accenture and its Avanade subsidiary. Collectively, they are creating preconfigured solutions geared toward helping clients in specific industries such as consumer-packaged goods, retail and telecommunications using AI to automate their business processes. Avanade's latest research found that 88 percent of global business and IT decision-makers say they don't know how to use AI -- and 79 percent encounter resistance.

Early adopters are already creating competitive advantages, and the gap with the laggards looks set to grow," is how McKinsey Global Institute puts it in their report Artificial Intelligence, The Next Digital Frontier?. They add: "In our survey of 3,000 AI-aware C-level executives, across 10 countries and 14 sectors, only 20% said they currently use any AI-related technology at scale or in a core part of their businesses. Many firms say they are uncertain of the business case or return on investment." However, investments in AI for the enterprise are ever-increasing and industry case studies are demonstrating the disruptive potential of AI. What is certain is that, whatever the industry, there's no longer any guarantee it will remain unaffected by the next Uber-like app. The IoT is real and ever-expanding.

General Electric (GE) was born when several electrical companies owned by Thomas Edison were merged under a single name - Edison General Electric Company - in 1889. Fast forward to 1892 when Edison General Electric Company merged with Thomson-Houston Electric Company, and both became united under a single name - General Electric. Today, GE is a multinational conglomerate corporation incorporated in New York with its headquarters in Boston, Massachusetts. The company has hundreds of interests, which cater to the needs of the financial services, medical devices, life sciences, pharmaceutical, automotive, software development and engineering industries. GE has revenues of $126,661 million, which places it at #13 on the Fortune 500 list.

With little fanfare, smart speaker company Sonos has just announced it plans to go public. Sonos plans to raise $100 million in its IPO, but noted that amount was "estimated as a placeholder." Along with the announcement, the company released the requisite S-1 form through the SEC, and that contains a host of other info about the state of the company. In it, the company starts by making it clear why it thinks it can be a long-term success: "The proliferation of streaming services and the rapid adoption of voice assistants are significantly changing audio consumption habits and how consumers interact with the internet. As the leading home sound system for consumers, content partners and developers, Sonos is poised to capitalize on the large market opportunity created by these dynamics."