One of the reasons the segment has drawn such significant investor interest may be that it represents a particularly broad market: Practically every large company has a customer support department. As a result, startups offering AI tools to streamline customer support operations have a large pool of potential buyers. Additionally, the growing focus on automating manual business processes in the enterprise is likely helping to fuel demand for products that can reduce the amount of manual work required to answer support requests.

Clean.io, a startup that helps digital publishers protect themselves from malicious ads, recently announced that it has raised $5 million in Series A funding. The Baltimore-based company isn't the only organization promising to fight malvertising (such as ads that force visitors to redirect to another website). But as co-founder wrote Seth Demsey told me last year, Clean.io CEO Matt Gillis told me via email this week that the challenge will "always" be evolving." "Just like an antivirus company needs to constantly be updating their definitions and improving their protections, we always need to be alert to the fact that bad actors will constantly try to evade detection and get over and around the walls that you put in front of them," Gillis wrote. The company says its technology is now used on more than 7 million websites for customers including WarnerMedia's Xandr (formerly AppNexus), The Boston Globe and Imgur. Clean.io has now raised a total of $7.5 million. The Series A was led by Tribeca Venture Partners, with participation from Real Ventures, Inner Loop Capital, and Grit Capital Partners. Gillis said he'd initially planned to fundraise at the end of February, but he had to put those plans on hold due to COVID-19. He ended up doing all his pitching via Zoom ("I saw more than my fair share of small NY apartments") and he praised Tribeca's Chip Meakem (who previous investments include AppNexus) as "a world class partner." Of course, the pandemic's impact on digital advertising goes far beyond pausing Gillis' fundraising process. And when it comes to malicious ads, he said that with the cost of digital advertising declining precipitously in late March, "bad actors capitalized on this opportunity." "We saw a pretty constant surge in threat levels from mid-March until early May," Gillis continued. "Demand for our solutions have remained strong due to the increased level of attacks brought on by the pandemic.

The "series A" round was led by Blumberg Capital, with participation from Correlation Ventures and existing investors including 235 Capital Partners. With the new funds, the San Francisco-based firm plans to support hiring and growth as the company continues to expand its user base across six continents. In contrast, the firm says its Logistics Orchestration product makes real-time data actionable, going beyond predictive visibility to achieve a new level of connectivity and responsiveness for multiple logistics partners to collaborate effectively. "Slync.io is extraordinarily well positioned with multiple customer wins from global blue chip logistics players and shippers that have traditionally built their own software systems. This indicates a tipping point in the industry where it's becoming clear to many they must move from proprietary, legacy systems to API driven modern AI-powered systems," David Blumberg, founder and managing partner of Blumberg Capital, said in a release.

Continual learning to build and automate ML pipelines from research to production, automatically retraining models in production with incoming data and advanced monitoring capabilities to ensure that models are accurate, healthy and performing well. Machine learning management that standardizes the full ML process in a collaborative environment, which supports management of models, experiments, data and research for "100% reproducible data science". An open platform that works with any framework or programming language. The platform's advanced connectivity to any compute resources (cloud/on premis) lets companies utilize on-premise infrastructure, including Kubernetes, Data Lakes, Hadoop, and more – as well as scale to any cloud service. Continual learning to build and automate ML pipelines from research to production, automatically retraining models in production with incoming data and advanced monitoring capabilities to ensure that models are accurate, healthy and performing well.

Roughly six years ago, former Israel chief technology officer Yonatan Adiri cofounded Healthy.io, a digital health care startup leveraging AI to bring professional-grade medical imaging to the homes of those with chronic kidney disease. Its 10-parameter digital testing kit -- Dip.io -- enables patients to collect and analyze urine samples with nothing more than a smartphone app, a dip stick, and a color-coded slide. It's taken off like wildfire. Following on the heels of an $18 million series B raise in February, Healthy.io CEO Adiri said the fresh capital, which brings Healthy.io's total raised to about $90 million, will accelerate Healthy.io's

First.io, a startup that uses artificial intelligence to predict when people are going to move, has raised $5 million in Series A funding. Launched in 2016, the Durham, North Carolina-based company develops software that predicts when people are likely to buy a home based on salaries, spending behaviors and major life events. "First helps agents identify the relationships they should be nurturing, and puts them in the right place at the right time to unlock the latent value of an agent's network," said First founder and CEO Mike Schneider in a statement. "This round of funding not only brings us partners with a wealth of expertise and additional, powerful distribution channels. It will also accelerate our development of new innovative products to help top agents leverage industry-leading intelligence to grow their businesses faster than ever."

SAN MATEO, California and TEL AVIV, Israel, July 12, 2017 -- Gong.io, the leading SaaS company in the fast-growing category of Conversation Intelligence for sales teams, today announced a $20 Million Series A1 round. The investment round was led by existing investors Norwest Venture Partners and CheckPoint Co-Founder Shlomo Kramer. They were joined by new investors Wing Venture Capital and NextWorld Capital. Peter Wagner, Founding Partner at Wing Venture Capital, and Ben Fu, General Partner at NextWorld Capital, will join as Board Observers. While managing some of the most successful hyper-growth start-ups, they realized that most companies don't understand why their sales teams aren't meeting their targets.

It also received funding from 83North, Giza and a new investor, Vintage Investment Partners. To date, Logz.io -- which develops artificial intelligence technologies to help companies monitor their networks -- has raised $47 million.