SoftBank's Newest AI Unicorns Are After More Than Amazon And The Weeknd

Coming off its best quarter ever, SoftBank is on the hunt for its next billion dollar IPO. Having funded 29 of the 657 unicorns in the world, according to CB Insights, the Japanese telecom giant has been on a shopping spree, looking for promising new AI startups to bet big on. At Collision's tech conference held online last month, I had a chance to talk with the CEOs of SoftBank's newest portfolio companies, Standard Cognition and Forward. Here's how the two San Francisco startups are leveraging artificial intelligence to help gain market dominance in the post-pandemic world. In 2017, a group of machine learning engineers at the SEC became obsessed with computers that could see better than humans and ditched their jobs to join Y Combinator to build the computer vision company of their dreams.