Human resources technology startup Talent Fabric Ltd., which does business as Perfect, announced today that it has closed on a $13 million seed funding round as it looks to take on established platforms such as LinkedIn Corp. in talent recruitment. Today's round was led by Target Global and saw participation from Joule Venture and RTP Global, plus a host of individual investors. Based in Israel, Perfect has created what it says is a generative artificial intelligence-powered platform that helps organizations to fill staff vacancies by mapping the profiling career graphs of millions of technology-focused professionals. The company says it wants to break LinkedIn's monopoly on the talent scouting market, so it relies on generative AI to help companies search for the ideal signals for each available position they're looking to fill. Perfect scans dozens of public data sources, including social media and other databases, searching for the ideal candidates whose skills match what an employer is looking for.

"Barcelona has triumphed over Madrid as Spain's startup capital because of the deal flow and the talent," explains Miquel Martí, Tech Barcelona's CEO. "International talent is attracted by the lifestyle, the strength of the ecosystem, and the presence of international companies." According to Barcelona & Catalonia Startup Hub--the region's startup directory--there are over 1,900 startups in Catalonia, mostly concentrated in Barcelona; since 2016, the number has grown by over 75 percent. The city has long had a strong tradition of health-tech startups fueled by university and regional government collaboration, but successful founders have been funding, supporting, and starting other companies, as well as diversifying into construction, mobility, and sustainability. There's also been a slow trickle of fintech companies from London, lured by post-Brexit border-free banking, good weather, a lower cost of living--and the beach.

JaiaBots are supposed to work in fleets to collect information in aquatic operations. Jaia Robotics, an organization growing micro-sized autonomous underwater autos (AUVs) for information assortment, introduced that it introduced in over $1 million in seed funding. The corporate goals for JaiaBot to be a low-cost, multivehicle system that may be person configured for a variety of capabilities. The software program for the corporate's robots is totally open supply and accessible utilizing gpl and lgpl licenses. JaiaBots are micro-sized, autonomous, hybrid floor and subsurface autos.

Tenyx, an AI technology company, announced it has raised $15 million in seed funding to grow its research and development team and further product development. Investors include AME Cloud Ventures, Cota Capital, Morado Ventures, Pathbreaker Ventures, Point72 Ventures and StageOne Ventures, as well as notable angel investors John Lilly, Georges Harik and Jaan Tallinn. Tenyx is led by the founding team behind Apprente, which developed the world's first voice-based AI solutions to automate the order-taking process at drive-thru restaurants. Apprente was acquired by McDonald's Corporation and subsequently by IBM. Tenyx' seasoned leadership team includes Dr. Itamar Arel, a former professor of AI and CEO at Apprente, and Prof. Ron Christly, an established AI researcher and head of the Cognitive Science program at Sussex University.

Tenyx, an AI technology company, today announced it has raised $15 million in seed funding to grow its research and development team and further product development. Investors include AME Cloud Ventures, Cota Capital, Morado Ventures, Pathbreaker Ventures, Point72 Ventures, and StageOne Ventures, as well as notable angel investors John Lilly, Georges Harik, and Jaan Tallinn. Tenyx is led by the founding team behind Apprente, which developed the world's first voice-based AI solutions to automate the order-taking process at drive-thru restaurants. Apprente was acquired by McDonald's Corporation and subsequently by IBM. Tenyx' seasoned leadership team includes Dr. Itamar Arel, a former professor of AI and CEO at Apprente, and Prof. Ron Christly, an established AI researcher and head of the Cognitive Science program at Sussex University.

EXtrance, a tech startup serving primary sponsors and their investors in commercial real estate limited partnerships, announced the closure of their seed round of funding. After raising $850K, the principal of which was a pre-IPO investor in Apple, MasterCard, Amazon, and Control Data, it has opened up an additional $150K round for strategic partners. Throughout 2021, EXtrance raised capital to develop an all-in-one investment management platform with AI integration, machine learning, and blockchain technology to automate back and middle office functions and facilitate commercial real estate investments. According to EXtrance founder William Lively, they expect to raise another $125K from individuals with a vested interest in the company and potential clients. Lively states, "Our platform is a holistic approach to solving all of the problems commercial real estate investors face, including that of illiquidity."

November 1, 2021 -- MindsDB, an open-source machine learning (ML) startup that brings machine learning (ML) to databases, announced today an investment from Walden Catalyst Ventures, closing out MindsDB's total seed round to $7.6M. Walden Catalyst Ventures joins YCombinator, OpenOcean (the venture fund launched by the creators of MySQL and MariaDB), SpeedInvest, and the University of California Berkeley SkyDeck fund. MindsDB's mission is to democratize ML by giving enterprise databases "a brain," driving better, data-driven business decisions without enterprises needing to become AI developers or experts. With MindsDB's platform, companies can leverage machine learning capabilities with standard SQL knowledge, allowing enterprises to lower development costs while accelerating machine learning capabilities. The platform is already used by several thousand open-source developers for everything from forecasting heart disease risk to insurance premium forecasts.

Zeit Medical, which makes an early warning system for strokes during sleep, has raised $2M in a seed round just after leaving Y Combinator's Summer 2021 cohort. The company's work suggests the brain-monitoring headband could save lives by alerting people to possible strokes hours before they might otherwise be noticed, and the new funding will help propel them towards commercial availability. The company's device is a soft headband with a lightweight electroencephalogram (EEG) in it. It works with a smartphone app to analyze brain activity and, using a machine learning model trained by human experts, watch for signs of an impending stroke. I wrote up Zeit's system in detail in August, and little has changed since then, though co-founder and CEO (and now Ferolyn fellow) Orestis Vardoulis noted that a usage study found that people wore the headband on 90 percent of nights, including people using CPAP machines, and there were few complaints about fit or comfort.

This morning Eleos Health, a company that uses AI-backed voice technology to gather insights into behavioral health, scored $6 million in seed funding. The funding news coincides with the company's announcement that Dr. David Shulkin, former Secretary of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, has joined the company's board. The Israeli company created a tool that uses voice AI capabilities to help mental health professionals analyze their patients. Clinicians can run the technology in the background of a mental health session. The system is then able to analyze the session based on "hundreds of data parameters" and in turn give clinicians more insights and information about the patient, and in turn help personalize care.

More than $3.5 billion in funding was funneled into 35 startups last month, much of that scattered across the globe. Several Chinese companies received significant funding as the country bulks up domestic production of wafers and GPUs. In addition, with attention increasing on the need for electric vehicles and renewable energy, big investments went into battery manufacturing startups. One company making EV batteries garnered $1.5 billion, while several other large rounds were targeted at grid-scale energy storage companies. Metax designs high-performance, reconfigurable GPUs based on its own instruction set for data center, gaming, and AI. Funds will be used for R&D, and the company recently launched a corporate research institute at Zhejiang University. Based in Shanghai, China, Metax was founded in 2020.