Investment professionals rely on extrapolating company revenue into the future (i.e. revenue forecast) to approximate the valuation of scaleups (private companies in a high-growth stage) and inform their investment decision. This task is manual and empirical, leaving the forecast quality heavily dependent on the investment professionals' experiences and insights. Furthermore, financial data on scaleups is typically proprietary, costly and scarce, ruling out the wide adoption of data-driven approaches. To this end, we propose a simulation-informed revenue extrapolation (SiRE) algorithm that generates fine-grained long-term revenue predictions on small datasets and short time-series. SiRE models the revenue dynamics as a linear dynamical system (LDS), which is solved using the EM algorithm. The main innovation lies in how the noisy revenue measurements are obtained during training and inferencing. SiRE works for scaleups that operate in various sectors and provides confidence estimates. The quantitative experiments on two practical tasks show that SiRE significantly surpasses the baseline methods by a large margin. We also observe high performance when SiRE extrapolates long-term predictions from short time-series. The performance-efficiency balance and result explainability of SiRE are also validated empirically. Evaluated from the perspective of investment professionals, SiRE can precisely locate the scaleups that have a great potential return in 2 to 5 years. Furthermore, our qualitative inspection illustrates some advantageous attributes of the SiRE revenue forecasts.

Artificial intelligence is a key element in responding to the growing challenges of the 21st century. With a number of applications in big data, computer vision, natural language processing, and more, AI is revolutionizing businesses, industries, and people's lives. Considered to become one of the main contributors to economic growth and international competitiveness in the upcoming decades, AI innovation is mainly driven by startups – the breeding ground for new technologies. Though it's hard to narrow the list down to just 5 candidates, we compiled some of the most successful European startups and scaleups that entered the market within the last few years and have been using AI for good. These teams are addressing enormous challenges and making life better in different sectors, such as health, energy, financial services, manufacturing, mobility and more.

For the Winter '17 cohort in collaboration with Macquarie Group, over 800 companies were vetted and 10 were accepted. The selected scaleups cover a range of technology verticals applicable to all enterprise. Collectively, the scaleups have raised £40m to date, have between 10 and 40 employees each and have an incredible breadth of enterprise clients -- ranging from Airbnb to Aston Martin to Barclays to Compass Group to L'Oreal to Wells Fargo. Collecting leads at events is a broken process. We're here to fix it.

Corporate venture capital (CVC) is an investment by a corporate (fund) into external startups in order to make a financial return or to gain a competitive advantage. CVC is a polarizing subject and opinions are divided. Fred Wilson from Union Square Ventures believes that it's evil and corporates should not invest in startups but simply buy them. While Marc Andreessen from Andreessen Horowitz on the other hand is co-investing with corporations such as General Electric. Whatever the opinions are, fact is that CVC is on the rise, also in the old continent.

Participants in Europe's largest technology conference next week will swap bracing, Guinness-fueled pub crawls by the River Liffey for some hilly, "Gothic grit and glamour" by the beach in mainland Europe's westernmost capital. The Web Summit, held in Dublin since its founding in 2010, opens in Lisbon on Monday and runs through Thursday. Often described as a "Davos for Geeks," the brainchild of Irish entrepreneurs Paddy Cosgrave, David Kelly and Daire Hickey will bring 50,000 people from 165 countries to the Portuguese capital. They'll network and listen to speakers including the actor Joseph Gordon Levitt and Sean Rad of Tinder. About 15,000 companies will be represented and 7,000 CEOs and business leaders will attend including Cisco Systems' John Chambers and Renault-Nissan's Carlos Ghosn.