Point72 invests in artificial-intelligence firm

Billionaire hedge fund investor Steven Cohen's venture capital group announced this week it had co-led a $15 million investment round in a Silicon Valley startup that is developing artificial-intelligence software for driver assistance and autonomous driving. Mountain View, Calif.-based DeepScale supports automated driving with "deep neural network" software that uses low-power, automotive-grade chips to detect vehicles, pedestrians and other "objects of significance." By doing so, DeepScale officials said they aim to bring driver-assistance and autonomous driving to mass-produced vehicles at all price points. "We've been following (DeepScale co-founder and CEO) Forrest Iandola's research on efficient deep learning for a number of years," Sri Chandrasekar, a Point72 director, said in a statement. "Forrest's inventions … have already been a game-changer for putting deep learning onto smartphones. When we heard that Forrest had started a company to put small DNNs into mass-produced cars, we jumped at the opportunity to get involved."