Tel Aviv's Run.AI, a startup that is building a new virtualization and acceleration platform for deep learning, is coming out of stealth today. As a part of this announcement, the company also announced that it has now raised a total of $13 million. This includes a $3 million seed round from TLV Partners and a $10 million Series A round led by Haim Sadger's S Capital and TLV Partners. It's no secret that building deep learning models take a hefty amount of GPU power or access to specialized AI chips. Run.AI argues that the virtualization layers that worked so well for in the past don't quite cut it for training today's AI models.

Torch.AI, a startup developing "network-centric" AI to deliver big data insights, announced that it raised $30 million. The company plans to put the proceeds toward growth as it acquires new customers, particularly U.S. federal agencies in the national security realm, including those operating in high-risk environments. Most enterprises have to wrangle countless data buckets, some of which inevitably become underused or forgotten. A Forrester survey found that between 60% and 73% of all data within corporations is never analyzed for insights or larger trends. The opportunity cost of this unused data is substantial, with a Veritas report pegging it at $3.3 trillion by 2020. That's perhaps why the corporate sector has taken an interest in solutions that ingest, understand, organize, and act on digital content from multiple digital sources.

The global market intelligence firm predicts that about 51.3 percent of China's GDP will be digitalization-related by 2023 as the country's enterprises step up digitalizing their businesses.

Observe.AI, the leader in AI-powered agent enablement for voice customer service, today announced a $26 million Series A financing led by Scale Venture Partners, with participation from Nexus Venture Partners, Steadview Capital, 01 Advisors, and Emergent Ventures. This funding allows Observe.AI to expand its US-India team globally and accelerate product development. In conjunction with the funding, Andy Vitus, partner at Scale, will be joining Observe.AI's board. This brings the company's total funding to $34 million. "Legacy speech analytics systems are simply not meeting the needs of the world's top brands," said Swapnil Jain, CEO and co-founder of Observe.AI.

SAN FRANCISCO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–INDUS.AI, a construction software company using computer vision to track and analyze construction project performance in real-time, announced today that it has received an $8 million Series A investment led by Millennium New Horizons with additional participation from strategic investors Foundamental and Groundbreak Ventures. Previous investors Spero Ventures, UP2398, and Bootstrap Labs also joined the round. The new funding will be used to accelerate product development and expand sales, marketing and customer success services. "The construction industry has been a neglected space for too long. This country expends extraordinary energy and capital to build amazing things – tunnels, train stations, skyscrapers and stadiums. But the sad truth is that the vast majority of those projects are painfully over-budget and delayed," said Matt Man, CEO and co-founder.

Fintech startup Active.ai, that delivers conversational banking through artificial intelligence (AI), has raised $3 million from Innocell, the venture capital arm of Spanish banking group Banco Sabadell, in an extension of its Series A funding round. With this, its total funding from the current round has touched over $11 million. Headquartered in Singapore, Active.ai raised $8.25 million in Series A back in November 2017, which was led by Vertex Ventures, with contributions from CreditEase, Dream Incubator, Kalaari Capital and IDG Ventures. The existing investors have contributed in this round too in order to retain their stakes. With this round of funding and partnership, Active.ai

Nearly every day, we hear about new advances in AI that enable new ways to monitor activities and people, transforming many processes in our day to day life. What we may then hear every other day is how AI can exacerbate racial and gender bias and pose a threat to privacy, job security, and economic well being. It could possibly even spark a war in the view of Elon Musk. As explained in Facial Recognition Concerns: Microsoft's Six Ethical Principles, "The widespread use of Artificial Intelligence-powered facial recognition technology can lead to some new intrusions into people's privacy." Given the ability to capture people's image and identify them on public streets in the name of security, people are rightfully concerned that they will lose their ability to maintain any privacy.

Being stuck on the phone with call centers is painful. Observe.AI is one company that wants to make the experience more bearable, and it's raised $8 million to develop an artificial intelligence system that it believes will do just that. The funding round was led by Nexus Venture Partners, with participation from MGV, Liquid 2 Ventures and Hack VC. Existing investors Emergent Ventures and Y Combinator also took part -- Observe.AI was part of the YC's winter 2018 batch. The India-U.S. startup was founded last year with the goal of solving a very personal problem for founders Swapnil Jain (CEO), Akash Singh (CTO) and Sharath Keshava (CRO): making call centers better.

Alphabet's Google said on Wednesday it would make its digital assistant available on Apple's iPhone, making a play for the higher end of the smartphone market and challenging Apple's Siri feature on its own devices. Google's AI raises the bar for rivals Apple, Amazon