MindsDB today announced it has raised $3 million to grow its automated machine learning platform made for data scientists and developers to quickly train and deploy models. The open source platform has been downloaded more than 250,000 times through Python pip installs or software with a graphic user interface and has been used by 20,000 developers. Explainability tools are also built in under the hood due to the work of cofounder and CEO Jorge Torres. "That's extremely important for us and extremely important for the industry to take on, because without explainability, you don't get the buy-in from the non-technical individuals," cofounder and COO Adam Carrigan told VentureBeat in a phone interview. The $3 million funding round is led by OpenOcean, whose general partner Patrik Backman cofounded and was a product lead at popular open source projects MariaDB and MySQL, respectively.

In Arabic, Indian or Eastern cultures where people can't really have an open dating profile, the traditional Tinder/Happn/Bumble/Badoo etc dating apps don't work too well as they are based on images. It turns out chat bots may be the way forward in these markets if a recent VC investment is anything to go by. NearGroup, a chatbot allowing users to connect with like-minded people based on proximity, personality and their creative content has raised a $1.6m (£1.2m) seed round led by OpenOcean, with participation from Neotribe and BoostVC. NearGroup will use the funding to expand in Asia Pacific, the US and Europe. The NearGroup chatbot (open in for Messenger) allows users to read the'stories' of individuals nearby, and reply to people they want to start a conversation with.