Sight Machine provides an artificial intelligence-powered digital manufacturing platform that is unique in its ability to create a digital twin of the entire manufacturing process. The San Francisco-based startup recently raised a $29.4 million Series C funding round led by South Korean conglomerate LS Group, bringing its total funding to roughly $85 million. The company's platform allows manufacturers to quickly create customized analytics and applications from a diverse variety of data sources on the factory floor.

Venture funding for artificial intelligence startups reached an all-time high last year at $9.33 billion, according to the PwC MoneyTree Report, showing that interest in early stage companies tackling inferencing, training and other AI processes is as strong as ever. These startups are tackling AI and machine learning in a variety of ways, from providing new hardware components to accelerate training and inference workloads to building new software platforms that leverage AI to improve business processes. What follows is an overview of the 10 coolest machine-learning and AI startups of 2019 that the channel needs to pay attention to.

An artificial intelligence revolution has been eagerly awaited since the late 1950s, when pioneering IBM researcher Arthur Samuel trained the world's first self-learning computer to play a mean game of checkers. But only in the past few years has the long-promised technology become mature, effective and -- thanks to a variety of new offerings -- readily accessible to the channel. AI and machine learning are now taking the industry by storm, with the cloud fast-tracking adoption of solutions that make decisions, automate business processes, deliver predictions and insights and learn from their own experience. Next-gen startups are at the forefront of the revolution, delivering infrastructure, development frameworks, and intelligent applications that allow enterprises to take advantage of their data in ways never before possible.