Startup CognitiveScale, which bills itself as “The Cognitive Cloud Company”, announce the close of $21.8M in series b financing from Norwest Ventures and Intel Capital. Intel’s been pretty busy investor in the ML space—you’ll recall we touched on their Itseez acquisition and Lumiata investment back in June.
While the company’s web site is pretty buzzword-rich, as best as I can tell, CognitiveScale offers a cloud-based business intelligence platform for large enterprises consisting of an integrated Hadoop data lake and data warehouse connected to a set of “cognitive APIs” including deep learning and machine learning that can to some degree or another automate the discovery of relationships within the collected data sets and create personalized recommendations for customers.
The Austin-based company seems to be doing something right, as it counts Macy’s, Nestle, Barclays, P&G and the MD Anderson Cancer Center among its customers.
Another startup, People.ai, launched this week as part of incubator Y Combinator’s summer batch. The company applies machine learning technologies to give sales reps predictive coaching based on a past successes and data gleaned from a variety of different data sources. In this regard it looks like the People.ai offering is similar to that of the more established InsideSales.com, which also relies heavily on machine learning and advanced analytics.
Finally, another quick note before we move on. I’ve talked a bit about neural artistic style transfer, and the popular Prisma app that implements it for iOS and Android, and now there’s a new app on the scene called Artisto that does something similar for video. Unfortunately, as was the case for Prisma in the beginning, it’s only available for iOS right now. I’ve found Prisma to be a bit slow on my device. Since I imagine Artisto would have to be quite a bit slower, I’m not sure how useable it will be. If you’ve played with it let me know on twitter or in the show notes comments.
