Israel's war on Gaza, now well into its fourth month, has taken a toll on its own economy with many industries pausing business even as a few continue to get new investments. Since October, Israel's government has subsidised the salaries of reportedly 360,000 mobilised reservists deployed to Gaza – many of whom are high-tech industry workers in finance, artificial intelligence, pharmaceuticals and agriculture. In November, the Bank of Israel put the war's "gross effects" on Israel at 198 billion shekels ( 53bn) and pared back its estimates for economic growth to 2 percent per year for 2023 and 2024, down from 2.3 percent and 2.8 percent. In December, Israel's Finance Ministry said that the war will likely cost Israel approximately 13.8bn this year if its high-intensity phase concludes during the first quarter of 2024. In the midst of that, experts are watching to see how business is doing on the ground.

"We believe that any company should be able to develop reliable operational ML applications and easily adopt real-time capabilities no matter the use case at hand or the engineering resources on staff. This new funding will help us further build and strengthen both Tecton's feature platform for ML and the Feast open source feature store, enabling organizations of all sizes to build and deploy automated ML into live, customer-facing applications and business processes, quickly and at scale," said Mike Del Balso, co-founder and CEO of Tecton. Tecton was founded by the creators of Uber's Michelangelo platform to make world-class ML accessible to every company. Tecton is a fully-managed ML feature platform that orchestrates the complete lifecycle of features, from transformation to online serving, with enterprise-grade SLAs. The platform enables ML engineers and data scientists to automate the transformation of raw data, generate training data sets and serve features for online inference at scale.

Trust greases the wheels of the sharing economy, paving the way for transactions to take place between total strangers. But figuring out who is trustworthy and who is not remains a sticky bottleneck for digital businesses wanting to scale faster. Meanwhile the consequences for customers when startups screw up these risk calculations can be very unpleasant indeed. The traditional route to assessing risk is to run a full background check on an individual -- a process that can be time-consuming and expensive, given it can involve sending an actual person to an actual courthouses to parse actual paper records. Which is why, in recent years as sharing economy businesses have been gunning to scale up, other entrepreneurs have spotted an opportunity to step in to offer online services for verifying identity and screening for unsavory behavior, to try to steal a march on more established but slower paced background checkers.

Trust greases the wheels of the sharing economy, paving the way for transactions to take place between total strangers. But figuring out who is trustworthy and who is not remains a sticky bottleneck for digital businesses wanting to scale faster. Meanwhile the consequences for customers when startups screw up these risk calculations can be very unpleasant indeed. The traditional route to assessing risk is to run a full background check on an individual -- a process that can be time consuming and expensive, given it can involve sending an actual person to an actual courthouses to parse actual paper records. Which is why, in recent years as sharing economy businesses have been gunning to scale up, other entrepreneurs have spotted an opportunity to step in to offer online services for verifying identity and screening for unsavory behavior, to try to steal a march on more established but slower paced background checkers.

April 5, 2016 – NEW YORK, NY – Persado, the leading cognitive content generation platform, today announced that it has closed a 30 million Series C financing led by Goldman Sachs, with participation from all previous investors Bain Capital Ventures, StarVest Partners, American Express Ventures and Citi Ventures. Persado fuses language with data to transform people into the most effective communicators. The only existing solution of its kind, and one of few to successfully productize and commercialize cognitive computing technologies to date, Persado's platform employs natural language processing and machine learning algorithms to generate the precise combination of words, phrases and images that motivate any audience, at scale, in real time. "Persado is revolutionizing how organizations communicate by propelling creativity into the data-driven age, arming brands with'smart content' that resonates with any audience, every time, and inspires them to act," said Alex Vratskides, CEO and Co-Founder of Persado. "This latest round of funding will enable us to continue investing in distribution and product development. It will also accelerate our expansion into more digital channels and potentially other sectors beyond marketing, such as pharmaceutical adherence, fitness and personal motivation, civic engagement, human resources and more."