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Amazon acquires autonomous vehicle startup Zoox

June 28, 2020 Big Data

Amazon today announced it is acquiring Zoox, a startup developing autonomous vehicle systems aimed at ride-hailing applications. Neither company disclosed terms of the deal, but according to the Information and the Financial Times, the purchase price is over $ 1.2 billion.

It’s Amazon’s biggest bet yet on autonomous technologies — whether vehicular, aeronautic, or industrial. Last February, Amazon contributed to driverless car and truck startup Aurora’s $ 530 million series B round. In March 2012, Amazon acquired warehouse robotics startup Kiva Systems for $ 775 million.

With Zoox, Amazon — which delivers more than 10 billion items worldwide each year — is looking to cut costs. Analysts at Morgan Stanley estimate self-driving technology could save the tech giant over $ 20 billion a year on shipping as it becomes a formidable competitor to companies like UPS, DHL, and FedEx. By 2023, Amazon is expected to spend $ 90 billion on logistics, expanding its truck trailer, ocean freighter, last-mile delivery van, and cargo jet networks.

“Zoox is working to imagine, invent, and design a world-class autonomous ride-hailing experience,” said Amazon global consumer CEO Jeff Wilke in a statement. “Like Amazon, Zoox is passionate about innovation and about its customers, and we’re excited to help the talented Zoox team to bring their vision to reality in the years ahead.”

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The story so far

Zoox was founded in 2014 by Australian artist-designer Tim Kentley Klay and Jesse Levinson, son of Apple chair Arthur D. Levinson, who was developing self-driving technology at Stanford. In December 2018, Zoox was first to gain approval to provide driverless transport services to the public in California. And in January 2019, the company appointed former Intel chief strategy officer Aicha Evans CEO, signaling a shift in priorities from conceptualization to commercialization.

Foster City, California-based Zoox had raised over $ 990 million in venture capital at a multibillion-dollar valuation, and it appeared to be making progress toward a commercial launch before live testing of its level 3 vehicles ground to a halt during the pandemic. The company recently announced it would begin deploying its autonomous Highlanders in Las Vegas. It has a permit from the Nevada Department of Motor Vehicles to transport passengers autonomously and has submitted documents to the California DMV showing its 58 vehicles drove 67,015 autonomous miles in 2019 in San Francisco.

Zoox had hoped to move beyond retrofitted Highlanders to fully custom cars that could be summoned by customers via a smartphone app. The roughly BMW i3-sized electric vehicles would have used cameras and four lidar sensors for perception, with each one covering 270 degrees. The vehicles were also designed with four-wheel steering, active four-wheel suspension, dual power trains, and dual batteries with a combined capacity larger than that of most single-car batteries today.

The idea was to reduce congestion through fleet management and to minimize trips back to base stations for charging overnight. Zoox’s shuttle-like car — which was fully driverless — was designed to operate in a shared fleet in order to maximize efficiency and cut down on ride trip times.

The focus on efficiency likely appealed to Amazon’s newfound conservationist sensibilities. In February 2019, Amazon led a $ 700 million funding round in Rivian, a Michigan-based startup developing electric pickup trucks, which Amazon claims will save an estimated 4 million metric tons of carbon per year by 2030. Amazon plans to have 10,000 of Rivian’s vehicles making on-the-road deliveries as early as 2022 and 100,000 vehicles on the road by 2040.

Plans

According to Amazon, Zoox founders Evans (CEO) and Levinson (CTO) will continue to lead Zoox as a standalone business, and Amazon will help “bring their vision of autonomous ride-hailing to reality.” Amazon gave little away in terms of how it will leverage the technology. It could convert Zoox’s planned robo-taxis into automated delivery vans further down the road, a task it certainly has the expertise to pull off. According to Reuters, Amazon holds more than 210 transportation-related patents, including a 2017 patent to provide on-demand transportation services through a network of autonomous vehicles.

Zoox previously said it was demonstrating its vehicle to partners and insiders behind closed doors, but the next phase of its deployment plans remain unclear. A few months ago, Zoox reportedly laid off 10% of its 1,000-person workforce days after letting go of 120 contract workers, moves it blamed on the economic fallout from the pandemic. It also said it would pay Tesla an undisclosed amount of monetary damages and undergo an audit to settle a trade secret theft lawsuit filed last year in which Tesla claimed some former employees brought proprietary information to Zoox.

According to the Information, a majority of Zoox investors — among them Lux Capital, DFJ, Primavera Capital, and Atlassian cofounder Michael Cannon-Brooks’ Grok Ventures — will see a return from the purchase. Still, the reported $ 1 billion price tag supports the notion that autonomous vehicle development remains expensive. Ford and Volkswagen partner Argo AI recently closed a $ 2.6 billion round at a $ 7.25 billion valuation. In May, Didi Chuxing’s self-driving unit nabbed $ 500 million, led by SoftBank’s Vision Fund 2. And in March, Waymo managed to secure a $ 750 million extension, bringing its first external round to $ 3 billion.

The race has taken on greater urgency as the pandemic roils the economy. While startups like Gatik, Optimus Ride, TuSimple, and Nuro have escaped the worst of it so far, well-financed ventures — including Cruise, Kodiak Robotics, and Ike — have shed hundreds of employees collectively.

Analysts predict the health crisis and its effects will result in consolidation, tabled or canceled launches, and shakeups across the autonomous transportation industry. In something of a case in point, Ford pushed the unveiling of its self-driving service from 2021 to 2022, and Waymo CEO John Krafcik told the New York Times the pandemic delayed work by at least two months.

According to Boston Consulting Group’s Brian Collie, broad commercialization of AVs won’t happen before 2025 or 2026 — at least three years later than originally anticipated.

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Big Data – VentureBeat

Microsoft acquires ADRM Software to beef up Azure with industry data models

June 18, 2020 Big Data

Microsoft today announced it has acquired ADRM Software, which provides large-scale industry data models companies use as “information blueprints.” The tech giant says it plans to combine these models with storage and compute from Azure to support the creation of data lakes where information from multiples lines of business is collated together at scale.

Industry data models enable companies to capture and define business concepts, refine and integrate processes, and build interoperability into their ecosystems. But despite the fact that they’re foundational for things like data quality, lineage, and governance, such models are often implemented on a fragmented and siloed basis.

That’s where ADRM comes in. It develops industry-specific enterprise, data warehouse, business area, and solution data models spanning 10 industry groups and 65 lines of business. For each organization, the company creates an enterprise data model containing a subset of entities from business area models for that organization’s industry. A slice of between 21 and 30 comprehensive business area models provides detail and expanded scope for each of the areas, offering a view of data for that business or specific subject area.

ADRM says its data models help customers in 18 firms around the world plan, architect, design, govern, report, and gather business intelligence and analytics. Complementing those models, the company provides industry best practices content and industry-specific naming and definitions.

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“Data and AI are the foundation of modern technological innovation, yet businesses today struggle to unlock the full value data has to offer as fragmented data estates hinder digital transformation,” Microsoft Azure CVP Ravi Krishnaswamy wrote in a press release. “Without a comprehensive and integrated view of their data, companies are at a competitive disadvantage, which hinders digital adoption and data-driven innovation … [Now] these capabilities will be delivered at scale, enabling our customers to accelerate digital progress and reduce risk in a variety of major initiatives.”

With the acquisition, ADRM’s team joined Microsoft’s Azure global engineering arm. Financial terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.

“As we worked closely with the Azure global engineering team during the past year, we became very enthusiastic about the tremendous additional value and acceleration we believe can be unlocked for large enterprises across many industries by combining ADRM’s comprehensive industry data models with the limitless storage and compute from Azure to power the next generation of intelligent data lakes — data lakes which aren’t just vast reservoirs of data but which are also metadata-rich foundations [that] can supercharge modern data warehouses, next-level analytics, and AI and ML,” ADRM wrote in a blog post.

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Big Data – VentureBeat

Intel acquires urban mobility startup Moovit for $900 million

May 4, 2020 Big Data

Intel has confirmed that it’s buying Israeli urban mobility startup Moovit, in a deal worth $ 900 million. Reports of the impending acquisition were first published by local Israeli publication Calcalist on Sunday, and in a press release today, Intel noted that it was buying Ness Ziona-based Moovit to help make Mobileye a “complete mobility provider,” which will eventually include driverless taxi services.

Chip giant Intel has a recent track record of acquiring Israeli startups. Just a few months back it paid around $ 2 billion for Habana Labs, which develops programmable AI and machine learning accelerators for datacenters. But back in 2017, Intel doled out an eye-popping $ 15.3 billion for Mobileye, a computer vision firm specializing in autonomous cars. Mobileye’s advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) are currently used in 60 million vehicles, and as the technology moves further toward full autonomy, Moovit’s arsenal of data will help Mobileye turn on “cost- and demand-optimized driverless” car services.

When the deal closes, Moovit will become part of the Mobileye business but will continue to operate under its own brand and run its existing partnerships. It’s also worth noting that Intel had previously invested in Moovit via its venture capital arm Intel Capital, meaning that the value of the acquisition is actually pegged at $ 840 million, net of Intel Capital equity gain.

The story so far

Founded in 2012, Moovit is best known for its consumer-facing app that’s used by more than 40 million active users globally to see the best ways to traverse a city using a combination of transport options, and even includes nifty augmented reality (AR) directions. However, the company has pivoted its core business to focus on licensing its back-end platform to third parties through a “mobility-as-a-service” (MaaS) offering. Through this, Moovit provides municipalities with data and analytics to improve city transport infrastructure, while corporations such as TomTom and Microsoft also leverage Moovit’s data to offer third-party developer access to real-time transport data to include in their own apps.

Intel acquires urban mobility startup Moovit for $900 million

Above: NYC: Moovit’s AR-powered “way finder” feature

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The value here for a company like Intel and its Mobileye subsidiary is data, which Moovit aggregates from myriad transit partners and corporations, as well as from its 40 million active users who generate more than 6 billion data points each day around traffic flow and user demand. Mobileye has made no secret of its plans for so-called “robotaxis,” and Moovit’s data will prove vital as it pushes into the driverless MaaS sphere.

Indeed, Intel and Mobileye intend to sell and lease self-driving vehicles for other companies and organizations to operate, while they also plan to deploy their own robotaxi services. But having the technology to operate fleets of driverless vehicles at scale is only part of the picture, and data and “customer-facing infrastructure” will also be required, according to Mobileye CEO Amnon Shashua.

In other words, Moovit gives Mobileye the knowledge it needs as it gears up to commercialize autonomous vehicle services in key markets around the world. Through the Moovit mobile app, Mobileye can push its robotaxi services as part of the broader trip planner offering, meaning that a commuter may see that the best way to get to their office is to take a driverless taxi from their home to the station two miles away, and then get a train the rest of the way.

The timing of Intel’s acquisition is notable, as it comes during a period of great uncertainty for companies such as Moovit — the global COVID-19 crisis has meant that public transport has been in low demand as people have stayed at home. Moovit itself publishes data regarding the impact of COVID-19 on public transit usage in key cities around the world, showing that it’s down by as much as 80% in some areas.

Above: Moovit data showing decline in public transit during COVID-19

As with other companies during the COVID-19 crisis, Moovit has sought new ways to keep business going. Last month it launched an emergency mobilization platform that makes it easier for transit organizations to redeploy their unused vehicle fleets to create new on-demand transport services for frontline workers. Corporations can also use the platform to arrange dedicated pickup services to get their essential employees safely to their place of work.

It’s not clear what role — if any — the COVID-19 crisis played in Moovit’s decision to sell now, but under the wings of a tech behemoth such as Intel, Moovit can worry just that little bit less about revenues in the coming months and years as society adjusts to what could become a “new normal” that leans heavily on remote working. The terms of the deal also seem like a decent exit for Moovit, which had raised around $ 131 million since its inception, including the $ 50 million series D cash injection led by Intel Capital in 2018.

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Big Data – VentureBeat

Rapid7 acquires cloud infrastructure automation platform DivvyCloud for $145 million

April 28, 2020 Big Data

Security data and analytics solutions provider Rapid7 today announced its intent to acquire DivvyCloud, a startup developing a cloud infrastructure automation platform, for approximately $ 145 million in cash and stock. The companies expect the deal to close during Q2 2020, subject to approval and closing conditions.

The acquisition — which comes two years after Rapid7’s initial public offering — is a spot of bright news in a startup ecosystem that’s seen hundreds of companies lay off workers since March, owing to coronavirus headwinds. And it points to the cybersecurity market’s strength at a time when enterprises are experiencing a spike in malware campaigns using coronavirus misinformation. Barracuda Networks reports that it saw a 667% increase in phishing emails linked to the coronavirus during the month of March.

DivvyCloud, which is headquartered in Arlington, Virginia, has its origins in the infrastructure teams at Electronic Arts and its subsidiary BioWare Mythics. There, DivvyCloud CEO Brian Johnson and CTO Chris DeRamus managed over 5,000 servers across five different countries with millions of paying subscribers. The two left EA in 2012 to develop a product that could provide a consolidated view and framework for the types of hybrid cloud environments they themselves oversaw.

DivvyCloud’s software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform offers real-time remediation with configurable bots and over 200 out-of-the-box guardrail policies. It works across public clouds such as Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Azure and protects against things like insecure interfaces and APIs, misconfigurations, weak authentication, account hijacking, and data breaches with a robust user and permission management system, all while integrating with popular DevOps platforms like Splunk, ServiceNow, Jira, Slack, and PagerDuty.

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As for Boston-based Rapid7, the company offers a range of enterprise-focused cybersecurity services including vulnerability management, user behavior analytics, and phishing protection. It owns and maintains the Metasploit Project, a project that provides information about security vulnerabilities and tools for penetration testing, and it recently refreshed Insight — its platform that analyzes over 50 billion events and millions of assets daily — with new vulnerability management and app security testing products.

Insight — which Rapid7 says is built on nearly two decades of research, a constantly expanding vulnerability and exploit database, Metasploit, and learnings from thousands of penetration tests and an in-house threat-hunting team — combines with predictive analytics and operates on customer data from network scans, logs, and endpoints via agents and data connectors. In this way, it’s able to derive insights from the data, delivering guidance in the form of risk scores and alerts for incident detection, app security, and IT optimization.

Insight’s InsightIDR offering finds attackers in millions of events and gives IT team members the ability to search endpoints and data in real time. InsightUBA helps to detect, investigate, and stop threats with smart attack detection and incident response tools. Logentries centralizes logs and ingests data to provide answers to operations questions, while Nexpose accounts for vulnerabilities, controls, and configurations to spot sources of security risk. And AppSpider dynamically assesses custom web, mobile, and cloud apps for vulnerabilities across environments.

DivvyCloud raised $ 29 million to date prior to the acquisition from backers including Providence Strategic Growth, MissionOG, and RTP Ventures, with the most recent round — a $ 19 million series B — closing in April 2019. In May 2019, Johnson told VentureBeat that it had doubled its staff and client base from May 2018, bringing on customers like Discovery Communications, Sky, Mediacorp, Twilio, GE, Fannie Mae, Turner, Autodesk, Kroger, and Pizza Hut.

During its Q4 2019 earnings call, Rapid7 announced 16% year-over-year client growth and a 35% uptick in annualized recurring revenue (ARR) from 2018 to $ 338.7 million. At last count, it had more than 9,000 businesses using its product suite.

One thing’s for certain: There’s no shortage of competition in the cyberthreat detection and remediation space. Ironscales employs AI and machine learning to defeat organization-wide phishing attacks in real time, and France- and Boston-based Vade recently raised $ 79 million to further develop its filtering stack that protects against compromise, malware, and spam. There’s also Tessian, which uses machine learning for securing enterprise mail, and Valimail, which nabbed $ 45 million last year to thwart email phishing attacks. That’s not to mention ZeroFox — it novelly taps AI to surface threats of violence and identify deepfake videos, or videos that take a person in an existing image, audio recording, or video and replace them with someone else’s likeness using AI.

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Big Data – VentureBeat

Inogic acquires Dynamics 365 CRM apps for tax calculation, recurring billing and payment reminders from Rockton Software

April 22, 2020 CRM News and Info

We are glad to share this news with our community friends that we have recently acquired three value added apps from Rockton Software that will assist in the billing and tax calculation for Dynamics 365. As you know, accounting within Dynamics 365 CRM is something that organizations have been craving for since long and thus with the acquisition of these apps automating recurring billing and subscription in Dynamics 365 CRM will be made possible and thus enabling our Partners to improve productivity and offer end-to-end solutions for their clients.

The motto behind acquisition of these apps was to provide complete accounting and billing solutions to sales and service industries under the header of our organization. We were already offering accounting services to the industries with QuickBooks integration, however, these three apps can also perform standalone using custom entities to record transactions. The apps acquired by us are – Software Management, Tax Processing and Recurring Billing.
Let’s delve deep and understand how these apps function to improve Dynamics 365 productivity:

It was developed keeping specifically VARs in consideration. This apps manages software billing and license management and also works for any organization that tracks monthly billing. It also offers flexible billing schedules, payment reminders and penalty calculation. Apart from this, it also helps in automated invoice generation at the click of a button. Also, it helps in sending invoices to entire Accounts Payable team or a single contact.

As Dynamics 365 users always crave for a feature to calculate tax within CRM, Tax Processing has been developed to calculate taxes right within CRM. This automation of tax calculation enables calculating taxes whenever a new quote/order/invoice is created. Taxes with Tax Processing can either be manually or with AvaTax from Avalara. This eliminates the manual calculation of tax and ensures accuracy while calculating taxes.

With Recurring Billing Manager the process of billing can be automated with support for creating billing on daily, monthly and annual billing plans. Invoices are automatically calculated for billing plans and overdue for invoices are created along with penalty for unpaid invoices. With flexible and automatic billing schedules, the task of billing is streamlined and made easy for the users.
Thus you have seen how with the help of these apps we will be able to incorporate accounting and billing in our CRM. With these apps the users can act more freely without the stress of calculating taxes manually, scheduling bills at intervals or generating invoices/penalty.
So it’s now time to get going quickly. Download the apps for a free trial of 15 days from the links mentioned above or email us at crm@inogic.com for a quick demo.

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CRM Software Blog | Dynamics 365

Square acquires deepfake research firm Dessa

February 8, 2020 Big Data

Square, the financial services and mobile payment company headed by Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, today announced that it’s acquiring Toronto-based AI research startup Dessa (formerly known as DeepLearni.ng) for an undisclosed sum. In a press release, Square said the purchase will bolster its machine learning and AI capabilities as it looks to improve its products and “pass on the benefits to … customers around the world.”

“Dessa is a leader in a variety of machine learning technologies,” wrote Square, noting that its team will continue working out of its office in Toronto with “no immediate changes” to existing products, customers, or business operations. (Dessa’s cofounders will continue to lead the team.) “Toronto is a global hub for machine learning research and development. We’re excited to expand our presence in the city’s growing tech sector by further investing in Canadian engineering talent.”

Dessa was founded by Eric Kin Ho Lee, Ragavan Thurairatnam, Stephen Piron, and Vincent Wong in 2016 and raised $ 9 million in September 2017 prior to the acquisition. It’s perhaps best known for its work on the detection of deepfakes, or media that takes a person in an existing image, audio recording, or video and replaces them with someone else’s likeness using AI. This tech is behind the incredibly convincing audio deepfake of MMA-commentator-turned-podcaster host Joe Rogan, and it’s responsible for a number of open sourced detection technologies intended to spread awareness about deepfakes.

Dessa offers core products in Atlas and Orbit, both part of its Foundations platform. Atlas lets developers run, manage, and evaluate up to thousands of AI experiments on-premises or in the cloud using any integrated development environment or Python tool and integrate with Google’s Tensorboard and Nvidia’s RAPIDS framework while lowering compute costs by over 50%. As for Orbit, it’s a comprehensive monitoring tool for machine learning in production that supports model retraining and the tracking of data quality, metrics, input, and more, with alerts and notifications that spotlight anomalies and data pipeline failures.

Beyond developing commercial offerings, Dessa collaborates with organizations in areas like health care, astronomy, and education to use machine learning to “tackle some of the biggest issues we’re facing today.” Late last year, the company built an AI system — space2vec — that identifies supernovas more quickly and accurately than legacy methods, and it previously teamed up with Scotiabank to develop a system that analyzes the behaviour of credit card customers to improve collections.

Piron says that at Square at least a portion of Dessa’s work will involve improving financial tools by developing techniques that might mitigate the use of deepfakes. He also notes that the company, which has over 30 employees and a second office in New York City, hadn’t planned on an acquisition but had connected with Square “in a serendipitous way.”

“Joining Square allows us to continue to evolve what’s possible with applied machine learning and double down on our commitment to doing so,” he wrote in a blog post published on Dessa’s website. “From day one, Square has been a champion of economic empowerment for people who might otherwise be left behind by traditional financial institutions. We’re excited to build new tools and products with machine learning at Square that will make finance easier for customers around the world.”

Square’s acquisition of Dessa comes after the financial tech company snatched up Eloquent Labs, a conversational AI services business founded by two leading natural language processing researchers.

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Big Data – VentureBeat

HPE acquires identity management startup Scytale

February 4, 2020 Big Data

HPE today announced that it’s acquired Scytale, a startup providing tools that help engineers build identity-driven and large-scale distributed software, for an undisclosed sum. According to HPE fellow and general manager Dave Husak, cofounders Sunil James, Emiliano Berenbaum, and Andrew Jessup will join HPE, where they’ll develop cryptographic-identity technology that offers customers the ability to design, deploy, and achieve IT operational goals regardless of supplier or location.

“This acquisition … represents HPE’s ongoing transformation, part of which is to embrace and contribute to open source projects … Our goal is to deliver services and products that advance these developments, and provide our customers and partners with the fastest possible path to application modernization,” Husak wrote in a blog post. “It’s my pleasure to welcome this world-class team as they become part of the HPE family. The addition of Scytale’s talent, their expertise, and the power of their community will, without a doubt, accelerate our progress toward [our] goals.”

San Francisco-based Scytale — which raised $ 8 million in venture capital prior to the acquisition — was founded in 2017 by Jessup, Berenbaum, and James alongside a workforce hailing from cloud-native enterprises like Amazon Web Services, Duo Security, Google, Okta, PagerDuty, and Splunk. It’s recognized as the founding contributor of the Secure Production Identity Framework for Everyone (SPIFFE) and the accompanying SPIFFE Runtime Environment, as well as other open source projects to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

Scytale has its beginnings in a December 2016 gathering of engineers in Los Gatos, California on zero-trust (ZT) systems. There, a whitepaper pitched SPIFFE, an open ZT standard and toolchain that makes service identity ubiquitously available.

SPIFFE was first released in December 2017, after which the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) adopted the project. Since then, technologies such as Istio, Consul, Network Service Mesh, and more have incorporated SPIFFE, and organizations like Bloomberg, ByteDance, Huawei, Pinterest, Square, TransferWise, and Uber have committed significant resources to the project. Today, SPIFFE is used to authenticate to public clouds like Amazon Web Services, or databases like MongoDB, MySQL, and PostgreSQL.

“Scytale’s DNA is security, distributed systems, and open-source. Under HPE, Scytale will continue to help steward SPIFFE. Our ever-growing and vocal community will lead us,” James wrote in a press release. “We’ll toil to maintain this transparent and vendor-neutral project, which will be fundamental in HPE’s plans to deliver a dynamic, open, and secure edge-to-cloud platform.”

HPE’s latest acquisition comes after the tech giant’s purchases of Cape Networks, Cray, and Plexxi, which similarly offer solutions to tackle hybrid and multi-cloud connectivity. In June, HPE CEO Antonio Neri pledged that all of the company’s products will be available as services by 2022, including subscription-based software and on-premises infrastructure that customers rent in a pay-per-use model.

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Big Data – VentureBeat

Shopify acquires 6 River Systems for $450 million to expand its AI-powered fulfillment network

September 10, 2019 Big Data

Shopify today announced it is acquiring 6 River Systems, a startup focused on fulfillment automation for e-commerce and retail operations. The deal is valued at approximately $ 450 million — 60% in cash and 40% in shares.

In June at its Unite partner and developer conference, Shopify announced the Shopify Fulfillment Network, which uses machine learning to ensure timely deliveries and lower shipping costs. Shopify’s fulfillment centers span California, Georgia, New Jersey, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Texas. The network, which is only available in early access, supports merchants that ship between 10 to 10,000 packages per day. The company hopes to eventually support between 3 to 30,000 packages per day. The 6 River Systems acquisition looks like an attempt to speed up that growth.

“Shopify is taking on fulfillment the same way we’ve approached other commerce challenges, by bringing together the best technology to help everyone compete,” Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke said in a statement. “With 6 River Systems, we will bring technology and operational efficiencies to companies of all sizes around the world.”

Robots in the warehouse

6 River Systems is best known for its Chuck autonomous vehicles that can move around packages in warehouses. Indeed, Shopify believes that adding the robots to its fulfillment network “will increase the speed and reliability of warehouse operations, by empowering on-site associates with daily tasks, including inventory replenishment, picking, sorting, and packing.”

While Shopify plans to accelerate the growth of its AI-powered fulfillment network, it promises to keep selling 6 River Systems’ solution for warehouses. The startup’s solution operates in more than 20 facilities in the U.S., Canada, and Europe. It fulfills millions of units each week for companies including Lockheed Martin, CSAT Solutions, ACT Fulfillment, DHL, XPO Logistics, and Office Depot.

Shopify doesn’t expect the transaction to have any material effect on its revenue in 2019. It will increase the company’s expenses for 2019 by $ 25 million, however, including $ 10 million in operating expenses, $ 8 million in amortization of intangible assets, and $ 7 million in stock-based compensation. The company does expect 6 River Systems to generate annual billings of approximately $ 30 million in 2020.

Founded in 2015 by Jerome Dubois, Rylan Hamilton, and Chris Cacioppo, 6 River Systems is based in Waltham, Massachusetts. 6 River Systems had raised $ 46 million to date from Eclipse Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners, and iRobot. Dubois and Hamilton were previously executives at Kiva Systems (Amazon acquired Kiva Systems for $ 775 million in March 2012). Shopify specifically called that out in its release, noting that the acquisition will give it “experienced leaders from Kiva Systems (now Amazon Robotics).”

The deal has already been approved by 6 River Systems’ stockholders. Included in the $ 450 million amount is approximately $ 69 million for the startup’s founders and employees “that will vest subject to certain conditions and will be treated as stock-based compensation.” The acquisition is expected to close in Q4 2019.

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Big Data – VentureBeat

Groupon acquires Presence AI to bolster booking capabilities with AI

August 11, 2019 Big Data

Groupon today announced that it’s purchased Presence AI, a San Francisco-based company developing a communications platform that automates business-to-customer calls and messaging. The terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, but Groupon chief product officer Sarah Butterfass said that Presence AI’s portfolio will complement Groupon’s existing booking products and help to “accelerate” its development roadmap.

Presence AI — a member of the 2018 Alexa Accelerator cohort — had attracted $ 20,000 in seed funding from investors, one of which was Amazon’s Alexa Fund.

“We’re pleased to welcome the Presence AI team and their booking technology to Groupon. Booking is a key part of our voucherless initiative aimed at improving the redemption experience, providing always-on availability, giving consumers more reasons to buy through Groupon and opening up our marketplace to a broader range of merchants,” said Butterfass in a statement.

Presence AI, which was founded in 2015 by Michel Meyer, provides a configurable virtual assistant that integrates with health, beauty, and wellness merchants’ scheduling software to accept and manage bookings. It’s able to reschedule or confirm appointments autonomously and remind people when it’s time to book again, and to answer commonly asked customer questions as they come.

Those capabilities were no doubt attractive to Groupon as it looks to invest further in reservable experiences. Ahead of a planned transition to “universal bookability” for certain services in the future, the company increased bookable inventory 12% year over year and booked tens of millions of diners, concert-goers, spa visitors, and more in 2018.

“We’re very excited to join Groupon and continue transforming client conversations through the use of artificial intelligence,” said Meyer. “With more than 3 million text messages generated last year, Presence AI is saving merchants time and generating additional revenues. We can’t wait to bring our technology to more businesses.”

Presence AI is Groupon’s first public acquisition this year following its purchase of U.K. cloud savings company Vouchercloud for $ 65 million in May 2018. Prior to that, the company snatched up rival LivingSocial in October 2016 for a price low enough to be considered “not material.”

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Big Data – VentureBeat

Apple acquires self-driving vehicle startup Drive.ai (updated)

June 26, 2019 Big Data

Self-driving car startup Drive.ai will cease all operations and lay off 90 employees, according to a June 12 filing with California’s Employment Development Department that was initially spotted by the San Francisco Chronicle. The news comes after reports that Apple was exploring an acquisition of Drive.ai to bolster the former’s secretive self-driving car project.

Drive.ai general counsel Thomas Yih wrote in the letter that the closure was necessitated “[by] events beyond Drive.ai’s control or current knowledge.” CEO Bijit Halder will be among those out of work when Drive.ai’s Mountain View office shutters on Friday, along with the company’s directors of finance and robotics.

Drive.ai declined to respond to VentureBeat’s request for comment.

In what might be retroactively interpreted as a sign of instability, Drive.ai cofounders Sameep Tandon and Tao Wang left the company in June and February, respectively, according to LinkedIn. Three weeks ago, five other Drive.ai employees — mostly data, systems, and software engineers — changed their LinkedIn profiles to say they left Drive.ai for Apple.

Drive.ai was at one time valued at $ 200 million, and it managed to raise nearly $ 80 million in four years from backers including New Enterprise Associates, GGV Capital, Northern Light Venture Capital, HOF Capital, Nvidia GPU Ventures, and others. Andrew Ng, formerly Baidu’s chief scientist and a researcher at Stanford, once sat on the company’s board of directors.

Drive.ai’s abrupt shutdown comes after it announced it would pull out of Frisco, Texas, one of its launch cities. At the time, it said it was because its contract with Frisco, where Drive.ai has operated a small fleet of autonomous Nissan NV200s shuttles on a single route between an office park and a high-end shopping complex, ended later in the month. (The City of Frisco opted not to renew it, citing high costs.)

That move came months after Drive.ai began piloting its driverless tech in Arlington, Texas.

Drive.ai’s shuttles — each of which was equipped with lidars, radars, GPS, cameras, and inertial measurement sensors that collected data about the outside world, along with onboard computers that interpreted incoming data in near-real time — ferried passengers on routes connecting the Dallas Cowboys stadium, an office park, a convention center, the Texas Rangers ballpark, and the University of Texas at Arlington. They featured screens that displayed symbols, emojis, and other visual cues to communicate their next course of action — a lane change or right turn on red, for example — to human drivers and pedestrians around them.

The vans operated with safety drivers aboard, but Drive.ai had planned to remove humans from the loop by the end of 2021.

Drive.ai’s service was paid for by the City of Arlington and the U.S. federal government and was originally slotted to run through October 2019, with an option to extend. The city requested that it end early, and a spokeswoman for the city told the Chronicle that Drive.ai’s vans dropped off their last passengers on May 31.

Updated 6:27 p.m. Pacific: Apple confirmed to Axios this evening that it acquired Drive.ai for an undisclosed price. A source tells the publication that the Cupertino company hired employees in engineering and product design, and that it additionally purchased Drive.ai’s autonomous cars and related assets.

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