HAYWARD, California – Robots that can cook -- from flipping burgers to baking bread -- are in growing demand as virus-wary kitchens try to put some distance between workers and customers. Starting this fall, the White Castle burger chain will test a robot arm that can cook french fries and other foods. The robot, dubbed Flippy, is made by Pasadena, California-based Miso Robotics. White Castle and Miso have been discussing a partnership for about a year. Those talks accelerated when COVID-19 struck, said White Castle Vice President Jamie Richardson.

LOS ANGELES - A Silicon Valley startup working on self-driving delivery vehicles on Monday announced nearly a billion dollars in fresh funding from the SoftBank Vision Fund. The $940 million in financing from SoftBank brought the total amount of funding raised by Nuro to more than $1 billion, with investors including Greylock Partners and Gaorong Capital, according to the company. The move comes amid surging interest in robotic delivery from a range of companies from small startups to retail giant Amazon. "We've spent the last two and a half years building an amazing team, launching our first unmanned service, working with incredible partners and creating technology to fundamentally improve our daily lives," Nuro co-founder Dave Ferguson said in a release. "This partnership gives us the opportunity to take the next step in realizing our vision for local commerce and the broad application of our technology."

By Cade Metz SAN FRANCISCO: For years, tech industry financiers showed little interest in startup companies that made computer chips. How on earth could a startup compete with a goliath like Intel, which made the chips that ran more than 80 percent of the world's personal computers? Even in the areas where Intel didn't dominate, like smartphones and gaming devices, there were companies like Qualcomm and Nvidia that could squash an upstart. But then came the tech industry's latest big thing -- artificial intelligence. AI, it turned out, works better with new kinds of computer chips.

Recent events demonstrate the growing presence of indoor mobile robots: (1) Savioke's hotel butler robot won the 2017 IERA inventors award; (2) Knightscope's security robot mistook a reflecting pond for a solid floor and dove in face-first to the delight of Twitterdom and the media; and (3) the sale of robotic hospital delivery provider Aethon to a Singaporean conglomerate. Travis Deyle, CEO of Silicon Valley startup Cobalt Robotics which is developing indoor robots for security purposes, in an article in IEEE Spectrum, posited that commercial spaces are the next big marketplace for robotics and that there's a massive, untapped market in each of the commercial spaces shown in his chart below: "Commercial spaces could serve as a great stepping stone on the path toward general-purpose home robots by driving scale, volume, and capabilities. The International Federation of Robotics (IFR) and the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society (IEEE/RAS) jointly sponsor an annual IERA (Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Robotics and Automation) Award which this year was presented to the Relay butler robot made by Savioke, a Silicon Valley startup. Listed below are a few of the companies in the emerging mobile robot indoor commercial marketplaces described in Deyle's chart above.

Predictions for the potential of artificial intelligence wax poetic -- solutions from climate change to curing disease -- but the everyday applications make it seem far more mundane, like a glorified clock radio. Thankfully, the future may be closer than we think. And the miraculous feats are not happening in Silicon Valley X-Labs -- in a plot twist, nonprofits are leading the charge in creating human-centered applications of the hottest AI technologies. From the simplest automated communications to contextual learnings based on analysis of deep data, these technologies have the potential to rapidly scale and improve the lives of our most underserved communities. Take chatbots for example, a new spin on mobile messaging that has historically been human-powered.

There are many choices we make over the course of our lives. Some are fairly insignificant, like the clothes we put on in the morning; others, such as the vocations we settle on, have life-changing consequences. But there's one critical decision we don't get to make: the choice of being born into a human body--and all the arbitrary ailments and inevitable biological breakdowns that follow. This is what sets health care apart from other industries. The business of medicine is quite literally one of life and death. And throughout much of the world, it remains a messy, inefficient, expensive sector in need of radical reform. Just consider some of the heart-wrenching numbers.

CHENNAI: Societe Generale's 10-week accelerator programme Catalyst has eight Indian startups working on various themes and three of them -Uniphore Software Systems, FixNix and Gavs Technologies are from Chennai, working on various risk and analytics tools that may be used by SocGen in future. FixNix, founded by Shanmugavel Sankaran, is trying to develop an early prediction based warning system for employee retention and proactive management of employee expectations. "We have a three-member team working on risk analytics in the accelerator. FixNix is getting aggressively into security and risk analytics for Indian and international banks, including Societe Generale, UBS," said Sankaran. The SaaS based governance, risk and compliance (GRC) startup has funding from ex-CIO of Tesla Jay Vijayan and other angel investors.

A Silicon Valley startup is trying to disrupt the made-to-order pizza industry -- an industry I really didn't think needed disrupting -- with pizza-making robots. You can go watch the robots in action over at Bloomberg. The pizzeria, Zume Pizza, was founded by one-time Zynga president Alex Garden (the maker of Farmville), who tells Bloomberg that he hopes the company becomes the Amazon of food. The pizza starts with a human chef who rolls out the raw dough and puts it on a conveyor belt. Marta, robot number one, spurts tomato sauce onto the disk and smears it around with what looks like a miniature floor buffer attached to a matrix of metal tubes.