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Kuang-Chi invests $5 million in SkyX, a maker of drones to monitor oil and gas pipelines
Shenzhen-based Kuang-Chi Group is investing $5 million in SkyX Systems Corp., according to the drone tech startup’s founder and CEO Didi Horn. A former fighter pilot with the Israeli Air Force, Horn started SkyX in 2015 to help public and private companies monitor energy infrastructure from on high, using increasingly powerful drones and big data analytics. Read More
Deep Algo was one of the more fascinating companies on display in Startup Alley at TechCrunch Disrupt this week. The French team aims to make coding languages more accessible for the massive with SaaS (software as a service) offering that promises to do for languages like C++, C Sharp and Javascript what WYSIWYG does for HTML. It’s a pretty bold claim, but the company is confident that… 
Salesforce is on a steady climb toward a $10 billion revenue run rate. And while it’s not quite there yet, its recent, nearly $2.4 billion quarter puts it squarely in the neighborhood. According to the company’s CEO, Marc Benioff, Salesforce’s revenue growth results give it “the fastest growth of any top [five] enterprise software company.” It’s clear… 
At the end of Google I/O, the company unveiled a new program to give researchers access to the company’s most advanced machine learning technologies for free. The TensorFlow Research Cloud program, as it will be called, will be application based and open to anyone conducting research, rather than just members of academia. If accepted, researchers will get access to a cluster of 1,000… 
On the stage of Google I/O, CEO Sundar Pichai announced Google.ai, a new initiative to democratize the benefits of the latest in machine learning research. Google.ai will serve as a center of Google’s AI efforts — including research, tools and applied AI. The new site will host research from Google and its Brain Team. It also allows anyone to quickly access fun experiments… 
The business of hacking has dealt a huge blow to our democracy, not to mention a plethora of organizations and individuals, and our collective sense of sanity. One silver lining, however, has been that it has led to the emergence of a number of security startups that are building and deploying a range of tools to try to track and stop the nefarious activity. One of the bigger of… 
What DefinedCrowd offers isn’t particularly easily to distill into a quick elevator pitch. Taking the stage today as part of the Disrupt New York Battlefield, the Washington state-based company deals in complex concepts of machine learning, providing rich data sets for speech and natural language processing systems. 
Intel, Salesforce, eBay, Sony, SAP, McKinsey & Company, Zalando and Cogitai are joining the Partnership on AI, a collection of companies and non-profits that have committed to sharing best practices and communicating openly about the benefits and risks of artificial intelligence research. The new members will be working alongside existing partners that include Facebook, Amazon, Google,… 
Siri is a critical component of Apple’s vision for the future, so integral that it was willing to spend $200 million to acquire Lattice Data over the weekend. The startup was working to transform the way businesses deal with paragraphs of text and other information that lives outside neatly structured databases. These engineers are uniquely prepared to assist Apple with building… 
Nexla, a competitor in the TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield this week in New York City, has more on its plate than simply impressing the judges. It also chose to launch at the event and, while it was at it, announced $3.5 million in funding led by Blumberg Capital with participation from Storm Ventures, Engineering Capital and Correlation Ventures.