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."

TOKYO--Japanese smartphone-game provider DeNA Co. said Thursday it has set up a company with Preferred Networks Inc., becoming the latest major firm to bet on the startup's artificial-intelligence technology for growth. The new joint project may mean Nintendo Co.'s future smartphone games would be powered by the technology, further beefing up the business potential of its popular characters, including Pokémon, for example, which was...