There is change in the air for Docker, the company that helped make software containers popular among developers. But Docker is under pressure from the growing ecosystem of Kubernetes-based services and other startups. So maybe it doesn’t come as a surprise that Docker CEO Ben Golub is stepping down. Golub will be replaced by Steve Singh, who is joining Docker from SAP. Read More

 This morning Facebook’s AI Research (FAIR) lab released an update to fastText, its super-speedy open-source text classification library. When it was initially released, fastText shipped with pre-trained word vectors for 90 languages, but today it’s getting a boost to 294 languages. The release also brings enhancements to reduce model size and ultimately memory demand. Read More

 This morning Orbital Insight, a geospatial analytics startup, announced that it had completed raising a $50 million Series C round of financing from Sequoia. The fresh capital brings the company’s total fundraising to $78.7 million. Orbital Insight generates analytics for businesses using satellite imagery and other data. A product of deep learning and more readily available… Read More

 When Bitfusion launched in 2015, its focus was on helping developers speed up their applications by giving them pre-compiled libraries that made better use of GPUs, FPGAs and other co-processing technologies. That was then. Today, the hottest market for these technologies is in training deep learning models. Unsurprisingly, that’s exactly what Bitfusion is focusing now. Read More

 Cisco has been rather acquisitive in recent years, buying 19 companies since 2015; today it announced it was acquiring cloud-based SD-WAN vendor Viptela for $610 million in cash. Viptela was founded in 2012 and had raised more than $108 million, including its most recent $75 million round just last May. The $610 million price tag appears to be a nice return for investors. Read More

 Equinix, an international data center company based in Redwood City, California, announced today that it has completed the purchase of 29 data centers from Verizon for $3.6 billion. The deal was announced in December. Verizon owns AOL, which owns TechCrunch. The acquisition greatly expands Equinix’s footprint, including giving it access to Latin America through a data center in… Read More

 Jive, a community collaboration software company that was one of the biggest Enterprise 2.0-era success stories, going public in 2011, announced today it had agreed to be acquired by ESW Capital’s Wave Systems for $462 million. It will become part of the Aurea family of companies.
In the end, it was a kind and healthy exit for Jive shareholders. ESW paid $5.25 a share to purchase the… Read More

 Rubrik, a startup that provides data backup and recovery services for enterprises across both cloud and on-premises environments, has closed a $180 million round of funding that values the company at $1.3 billion. The news confirms a report we ran earlier this week noting that the company was raising between $150 million and $200 million. Read More

 Chinese tech conglomerate Tencent will be opening a new AI research center in Seattle, according to The Information. The company has long had a core office in Palo Alto, but this will be its first major machine intelligence R&D effort in the country. Earlier this week Tencent announced that it would open its first data center in Silicon Valley. Read More

 After pricing its IPO at $15 per share, Cloudera, the enterprise big data company, closed the day up more than 20 percent, at $18.09. This also is above the range of $12 to $14 for which Cloudera was preparing. Read More