Charlotte-based artificial intelligence company Stratifyd has secured $10 million in debt financing, according to company database Crunchbase, topping the city's recent funding headlines. The cash infusion was announced August 6 and led by CIBC Innovation Banking. According to its Crunchbase profile, "Stratifyd is an A.I. powered analytics platform that is built around the customer feedback loop to enable enterprise companies to transform structured and unstructured human textual data -- found in call center platforms, surveys, product reviews, CRM systems and interactive chat sessions and other omnichannel sources -- into immediate actionable insights. This allows the business to take actions off insights from any customer feedback or data set. These insights will lead to increased customer retention, improved products and services and increased revenue."

Register now as seats are limited for this exclusive conference and they sell out fast. CardLinx members get priority for registration. We welcome non-member companies to attend by paying the $1,000 registration fee. Please contact [email protected] with questions or if you need additional information.

Lyft's head of machine learning Gil Arditi talked today at VB Summit 2017 about how to take AI out of the lab and into real-world products that provide competitive marketplace advantage. Lyft, which just closed an additional billion-dollar round of financing led by Google, has an internal four-stage process, Arditi says. The first step, of course, is data. "You have to normalize the data, make the data very clean, and very standard," Arditi said. This is a critical first step not only because machine learning requires data to process, but that bad data can lead to sub-optimal decisions that actually kill competitive advantage.