Light cofounder and CEO Dave Grannan raised $121 million for his imaging platform on the promise of its value to robotics, drones, and, especially, self-driving vehicles.Courtesy of Light In February, Dave Grannan, cofounder and CEO of imaging startup Light, flew to Tokyo to meet SoftBank's Masayoshi Son for the first time since beginning conversations with the Japanese billionaire's venture-capital arm. After two more meetings, in Tokyo and Silicon Valley, Son agreed to lead a massive $121 million investment in Light, through his SoftBank Vision Fund. Leica Camera also joined the deal. A big reason that Light was able to attract so much funding is the promise of robots, drones and, especially, self-driving cars. Light uses complex algorithms to combine images from multiple camera modules into a single, high-quality image with depth.

Mobile phones can do lots of things: search the Web, download music, send e‑mail. But the vast majori ty of the 233 million Americans who own them never use them for more than calls and short text messages. One reason is that other features often require users to enter sentences or long search terms, a tedious task. Speech-recognition interfaces could make such features easier to use. Vlingo, a startup in Cambridge, MA, is coming to market with a simple user interface that provides speech recognition across mobile-phone applications.