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Onfido raises £30M, Waymo's driverless cabs, Seedr's £50M valuation
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This week, The Information reported that Alphabet’s Waymo could launch self-driving cabs in Phoenix by the end of the year; in the UK, crowdfunding platform Seedrs raised £6 million from over 2,000 users, hitting a valuation of £50 million.
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Also, London-based Artificial Intelligence company Onfido has secured £22 million ($30 million) in a Series C round led by Crane Venture Partners, and backed by Microsoft Ventures, and Salesforce Ventures.
Founded in 2012, Onfido uses proprietary machine learning technology for identity verification and background checks.
The 150-employee company, which has offices in London, San Francisco, New York and New Delhi, is now planning to use the fresh cash to expand its international presence and further develop its technology.
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Alphabet could launch a self-driving cab service by the end of 2017
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Alphabet’s driverless car unit Waymo is making plans to launch a self-driving ride-sharing service—with no human backup driver— by late 2017, The Information reports. Waymo wants to kick-start the programme in the Phoenix area over the next few months—and apparently the order comes from Alphabet CEO Larry Page, who would have liked to launch the service already in 2016.
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Seedrs valued at £50M after £6M crowdfunding campaign
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Crowdfunding platform Seedrs has hit a valuation of £50 million following its own crowdfunding campaign, which raked in £6 million. That follows a £4 million investment the company raised in September from Woodford Investment Management .
Over 2,000 Seedrs users partook in the crowdfunding: the average investment was £3,200, while the largest individual investment was close to £800,000.
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DeepMind spent £150M in AI research in 2016
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New financial documents reveal that Alphabet-owned AI lab DeepMind spent £104.8 million on “staff costs and other related costs” in 2016. The exact number of DeepMind employees is not known, but thought to be between 500 and 600. Assuming it were 600, this would mean that each DeepMind researcher gets an average pay cheque of £175,000.
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Founder Interview: Tim Furche - Wrapidity
The web is inundated with sparse, unstructured data—so, how can we filter out the information we need for running our business? Oxford researcher Tim Furche has co-founded Wrapidity, a company that uses Artificial Intelligence to tease out the good stuff only. Watch him explain how.
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