Doha, Qatar – Under blocks of flashing lights, entrepreneurs, investors and business leaders converged in central Doha on Monday as Web Summit, one of the world's biggest tech conferences, opened in Qatar's capital. The event, held in the Middle East for the first time, brings together participants from dozens of countries who, over four days, will be hoping to establish new connections, share insights and secure funds. Kicking off proceedings, Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani announced that the Gulf state's sovereign wealth fund would invest more than 1bn in international and regional venture capital funds. Dubbed "Fund of Funds", the programme aims to foster innovation by attracting top international venture capital funds and entrepreneurs both to Qatar and the wider Gulf region. The commitment to boost the start-up sector builds on Qatar's aspiration to be a regional IT hub.

"It might be the best time for any kind of business in any industry to raise money for all of history, like since the time of the ancient Egyptians," an excitable Stuart Butterfield, CEO of Slack, told Farhad Manjoo in The New York Times in 2015. While interest rates remained close to zero, venture capital funds raised more money than ever and exited their investments at some of the highest valuations ever witnessed. The glory days of VC are over, and if history is any guide, the tech bust should last through 2024 and beyond. In other words, the venture capital bust has only just started. Ultralow interest rates benefited venture capital in a number of ways.

Booz Allen Hamilton has formed Booz Allen Ventures, LLC, a $100 million corporate venture capital arm that will invest in strategic dual-use commercial technologies for federal clients. Aligned with client demand and the firm's Velocity, Leadership, Technology growth strategy, Booz Allen Ventures will invest in early-stage companies and technologies within four core areas of demand: defense, artificial intelligence/machine learning, cybersecurity and deep technology. "We are proud and excited to continue our work with the best startups to support our U.S. government clients. The ability to navigate bigger, faster technology waves and identify the right emerging technologies for their mission needs, as well as our own, is vital to enabling growth and mission speed," said Susan Penfield, Booz Allen's chief technology officer. Booz Allen Ventures will enable Booz Allen to expand on its existing tech Scouting capability to source and recommend technology investments with a focus on mission-specific applications.

Booz Allen Hamilton, one of the 10 largest U.S. defense contractors, launched a $100 million venture capital fund to invest in fledgling companies creating promising new technology. The fund announced Wednesday, dubbed Booz Allen Ventures, will concentrate on bankrolling early-stage firms working on cutting-edge technology, and help them find ways to get those innovations into the field for use. Brian MacCarthy, vice president of tech scouting and ventures at Booz Allen, said in a Monday interview that the fund plans to invest in four to six firms per year, providing seed money ranging from hundreds of thousands to low millions of dollars. MacCarthy said there is a growing understanding in the defense world that more must be done to open funding streams for firms working on new capabilities such as artificial intelligence, which could in turn help Booz Allen's government clients. He pointed to the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence's 2021 final report, which recommended major new investments in AI research and development, as an example of the emerging consensus around this need.

TOKYO (Reuters) - Toyota Motor Corp's first venture capital fund is investing in startups that help the Japanese automaker refine everyday processes by bringing sharper supply-chain management and robotics to the factory floor, a fund executive said. The Silicon Valley-based Toyota AI Ventures fund, with $200 million under management, has so far invested in 36 early-stage startups, including self-driving car software firm Nauto, factory video analytics company Drishti and air mobility firm Joby Aviation. Toyota, the world's largest automaker by vehicle sales, and many car companies such as Volkswagen AG are funnelling money into startups to help gain an edge in artificial intelligence as investor interest shifts to self-driving cars. For instance Toyota, which has dozens of factories around the world, wants to be able to quickly share the lessons learned at one plant across other plants so that efficiencies are maximised, Jim Adler, the founding managing director of the fund, told Reuters in an interview. "If you look at cloud computing, for example, and cloud robotics, and fleet learning, when one robot learns something, the rest of the robots automatically learn that thing," he said.

It's hard to believe that a mere 50 years ago we still relied on humans to manage telephone switchboards. What once required an army of people to operate at scale was quickly replaced by computers powered by microprocessors. Nowadays, most of us can't imagine a world where humans are required to make a telephone call. Data science is in the midst of a similar revolution. While the mathematical tools to make predictions from data have existed for centuries, and the algorithmic ones for several decades, all have required humans to manage the data inputs and interpret/iterate on the outputs.

X-37 was cofounded by Atomwise Inc. and a team of experienced pharmaceutical developers from Velocity Pharmaceutical Development. In addition to the above development programs, the team at X-37 will identify additional high-value drug targets, generate novel drug leads against these targets using Atomwise's world-class AI platform for structure-based drug design, and develop each of these drug programs to a medically-relevant inflection point, where it can be acquired by or partnered with a major pharmaceutical company to be brought to market. X-37 makes use of an LLC structure permitting each drug development program to be housed in a separate virtual company under the parent LLC. This structure is tax efficient and flexible, in that it allows X-37 to divest individual drug development programs, while maintaining the parent company and team. X-37 began operation in 2018 and has already generated promising novel hit molecules against several targets of high interest to the pharmaceutical industry.

When I moved to China in 2014 to start my company, the country was still in the slow process of opening up its massive economy and developing its major foreign policy initiative, One Belt One Road. This aims to open up the economy by reviving the old Silk Road trade route, connecting Europe and China by land and sea, at a cost of $4-8 trillion. The impact of China's opening and development can be felt in every industry, especially the start-up and venture capital sectors. In 2014, only two of the world's top 20 internet companies were from China. Today, that number has jumped to nine.

VANCOUVER, British Columbia--(BUSINESS WIRE)--AbCellera announced today that it has closed its Series A financing led by DCVC Bio, a Silicon Valley venture capital fund focused on deep technology ventures that lie at the nexus of artificial intelligence and biotechnology. AbCellera will use the USD $10 million financing to accelerate the growth of their therapeutic antibody discovery business, including investments to build capacity and integration of advanced technological capabilities spanning computation, protein engineering, and immune repertoire profiling. "With this financing, we will double-down on our partnership business that has enjoyed profitable, triple-digit growth over the past 3 years. In DCVC Bio, we have found the ideal funding partner to help us accelerate the success of our full-stack antibody discovery engine, one that integrates artificial intelligence with industry-leading microfluidic screening technology," said Carl Hansen, CEO of AbCellera. AbCellera's high-throughput single B cell screening platform and repertoire sequencing technologies enable discovery of large multidimensional data sets of valuable antibody sequences.

We knew that Andrew Ng had more than just a series of deep learning courses up his sleeve when he announced the first phase of his deeplearning.ai It's clear now that the turn of Ng's three part act is a $150 million venture capital fund, first noted by PEHub, targeting AI investments. Ng, who formerly founded Google's Brain Team and served as chief scientist at Baidu has long evangelized the benefits AI could bring to the world. During an earlier conversation, Ng told me that his personal goal is to help bring about an AI-powered society. It would follow that education via his deep learning classes is one step of that and providing capital and other resources is another.