Twitch acquired video indexing platform ClipMine to power new discovery features

 In an announcement about a set of new discovery tools, Amazon-owned video game streaming site Twitch also unveiled that it recently acquired Palo Alto-based video indexing platform ClipMine. The startup’s technology is now being put to use to translate visual information in videos – like objects, text, logos and scenes – into metadata that can help people more easily find… Read More

Ripcord’s $40 million Series B will pay for more file digitizing robots and human jobs

 Bay Area startup Ripcord just scored a $40 million Series B, following its successful launch earlier this year. By all accounts, the company has apparently hit the ground running with its decidedly unsexy goal of using robots to digitize paper records for large corporations and organizations. According to CEO Alex Fielding, Ripcord already has a number of Fortune 100 companies on board,… Read More

Andrew Ng is raising a $150M AI Fund

 We knew that Andrew Ng had more than just a series of deep learning courses up his sleeve when he announced the first phase of his deeplearning.ai last week. It’s clear now that the turn of Ng’s three part act is a $150 million venture capital fund, first noted by PEHub, targeting AI investments. Ng, who formerly founded Google’s Brain Team and served as chief scientist at… Read More

Microsoft acquires Cycle Computing

 Microsoft today announced that it has acquired Cycle Computing, a twelve-year-old Connecticut-based company that focuses on helping enterprises orchestrate high-performance computing jobs, large data workloads and other “big computing” jobs in the cloud. The financial details of the deal were not disclosed. While Microsoft plans to use the company’s expertise to improve its… Read More

With $2.5M in seed funding, IOpipe brings monitoring to serverless applications

 Serverless applications are all the rage right now — and some companies are even leapfrogging containers to go all-in on services like AWS Lambda and Azure Functions. Unsurprisingly, these services are now spawning their own startup ecosystems. IOpipe, coming out of beta today, is an application operations platform (with a current focus on monitoring) for AWS’s pioneering Lambda… Read More

Indian messaging app Hike acquires hardware startup Creo

 India-based messaging app Hike is back on the acquisition trail after it picked up Creo, a hardware company that previously released smartphones, streaming devices and an operating system. The price of the deal is undisclosed. Hike released a short statement late on Friday announcing the acquisition, although it does not appear that the 50-person Creo will continue to work on hardware.… Read More

Filecoin’s ICO opens today for accredited investors after raising $52M from advisers

 Filecoin, the much-anticipated cryptocurrency that will eventually power a distributed file storage system, is opening its ICO today at 12pm PT / 3pm ET today.
Last week Filecoin concluded a much talked about “advisor” sale that brought in a total of $52M from ~150 investors including Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Union Square Ventures, Winklevoss Capital and about 100… Read More