Dyno Therapeutics Raises $9M in Seed Financing

Dyno Therapeutics, Inc., a Cambridge, Mass.-based biotechnology company applying artificial intelligence (AI) to gene therapy, raised $9m in not previously announced seed financing round.

The round – secured when Dyno spun out of the lab of Prof. George Church of Harvard – was co-led by Polaris Partners and CRV. 

Led by Eric Kelsic, Ph.D., CEO and Co-founder, the company has also launched from stealth mode with its proprietary platform, CapsidMap™. The platform applies proprietary artificial intelligence technology to discover and design novel AAV capsids, the cell-targeting protein shell of viral vectors. CapsidMap systematically generates and then evaluates millions of new AAV variants at scale, accelerating the identification of improved AAV vectors. It uses advanced machine learning search algorithms, combined with high-throughput experiments generating massive quantities of in vivo data, to accelerate the creation of superior synthetic AAV capsids. Through its R&D and collaborations with biopharmaceutical companies, Dyno has active programs focused on novel gene therapy vectors for ophthalmic, muscle, central nervous system (CNS), and liver diseases. The platform builds on certain intellectual property developed in the lab of George Church, Ph.D., who is Robert Winthrop Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School (HMS) and a Core Faculty member at Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering. Dyno has an exclusive option to enter into a license agreement with Harvard University for this technology. Church is a co-founder of Dyno and Chairman of the company’s Scientific Advisory Board.

Alan Crane, a co-founder of Dyno and Entrepreneur Partner at Polaris Partners, and Dylan Morris, General Partner at CRV, have joined Dyno’s board of directors, with Alan Crane serving as Dyno’s Executive Chairman.

In addition, founders include Sam Sinai, Ph.D., Lead Machine Learning Scientist, Adrian Veres, Ph.D., Scientific Advisor, and Tomas Bjorklund, Ph.D., a scientific advisor of Dyno who is Associate Professor at Lund University and a leader in AAV capsid engineering.

Source. FinSMEs, May 11, 2020

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Covariant Raises $40M in Series B Funding

Covariant, a Berkeley, CA-based developer of artificial intelligence for robotics, raised $40m in Series B funding.

The round, which brought total funding raised to date to $67m, was led by Index Ventures and Radical Ventures with participation from Amplify Partners, etc. In conjunction with the funding, Mike Volpi, partner at Index Ventures, will be joining Covariant’s board.

The company will use the funds to expand its research, engineering and commercial teams, add partnerships, and launch AI Robotics to new industries.

Founded in 2017 by Pieter Abbeel, president, chief scientist officer and Peter Chen, CEO, Covariant is building the Covariant Brain, a universal AI to give robots the ability to see, reason and act on the world around them. In 2020, the company launched from stealth and later announced partnerships with ABB and Knapp.

Source. FinSMEs, May 7, 2020

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Olive Raises $51M in Funding

Olive, a Columbus, Ohio-based company creating an AI workforce for healthcare, closed its $51m funding round.

The round was led by General Catalyst with participation from existing investors include Drive Capital, Oak HC/FT, Ascension Ventures and others. In conjunction with the funding, Ron Paulus, former president and CEO of Mission Health, a $2 billion integrated health system, will join Olive’s Board of Directors.

The company intends to use the funds to accelerate its growth.

Led by Sean Lane, CEO, Olive provides an AI workforce that automates healthcare’s most repetitive, high-volume administrative processes, across departments such as Revenue Cycle, Information Technology, Supply Chain, Clinical Administration, Human Resources and more, to deliver improved efficiency, reduced costs, and increased employee capacity. In 2019, the company’s presence grew to over 500 U.S. hospitals across 41 states, including 25 of the nation’s largest health systems.

Source, FinSMEs, April 1, 2020

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Espressive lands $30M Series B to build better help chatbots

Espressive, a four-year-old startup from former ServiceNow employees, is working to build a better chatbot to reduce calls to company help desks. Today, the company announced a $30 million Series B investment.

Insight Partners led the round with help from Series A lead investor General Catalyst along with Wing Venture Capital. Under the terms of today’s agreement, Insight founder and managing director Jeff Horing will be joining the Espressive Board. Today’s investment brings the total raised to $53 million, according to the company.

Company founder and CEO Pat Calhoun says that when he was at ServiceNow he observed that, in many companies, employees often got frustrated looking for answers to basic questions. That resulted in a call to a Help Desk requiring human intervention to answer the question.

He believed that there was a way to automate this with AI-driven chatbots, and he founded Espressive to develop a solution. “Our job is to help employees get immediate answers to their questions or solutions or resolutions to their issues, so that they can get back to work,” he said.

They do that by providing a very narrowly focused natural language processing (NLP) engine to understand the question and find answers quickly, while using machine learning to improve on those answers over time.

“We’re not trying to solve every problem that NLP can address. We’re going after a very specific set of use cases which is really around employee language, and as a result, we’ve really tuned our engine to have the highest accuracy possible in the industry,” Calhoun told TechCrunch.

He says what they’ve done to increase accuracy is combine the NLP with image recognition technology. “What we’ve done is we’ve built our NLP engine on top of some image recognition architecture that’s really designed for a high degree of accuracy and essentially breaks down the phrase to understand the true meaning behind the phrase,” he said.

The solution is designed to provide a single immediate answer. If, for some reason, it can’t understand a request, it will open a help ticket automatically and route it to a human to resolve, but they try to keep that to a minimum. He says that when they deploy their solution, they tune it to the individual customers’ buzzwords and terminology.

So far they have been able to reduce help desk calls by 40% to 60% across customers with around 85% employee participation, which shows that they are using the tool and it’s providing the answers they need. In fact, the product understands 750 million employee phrases out of the box.

The company was founded in 2016. It currently has 65 employees and 35 customers, but with the new funding, both of those numbers should increase.

Source, TechCrunch, March 25, 2020

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Remesh Raises $25M in Series A2 Funding

Remesh, a NYC-based software company utilizing artificial intelligence for organizations to conduct research, raised $25m in Series A2 funding.

The round, which brought total funding raised to date to over $38m, was led by General Catalyst, with participation from LionBird (Series Seed lead), North Coast Ventures, and several new external investors.

The company intends to use the funds to accelerate expansion and launch of its new AI-powered agile research platform, further grow the team and expand into the U.S. by opening up a new Cleveland office.

Led by Andrew Konya, Co-Founder and CEO, Remesh enables organizations to speak directly to up to 1,000 of their target audience live and gain insights from qualitative information at scale. The platform leverages machine learning to analyze and organize the responses in real-time. As a result, teams are able to speed up innovation cycles and uncover what customers or employees want – allowing them to build products, messaging, and organizations.

Customers include more than 600 companies such as Deloitte, Barclays, and Mercer.

Source. FinSMEs,  March 12, 2020

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Evisort Closes $15m Series A Funding

Evisort, a San Mateo, CA-based artificial intelligence-powered contract intelligence system, closed a $15m Series A funding

The round was led by Vertex Ventures and M12, Microsoft’s venture fund, with participation from Amity Ventures and Serra Ventures

The company intends to use the new funds to grow its team, expand product offerings, enhance the customer experience, and launch a new research and development office in Montreal, Quebec. Evisort anticipates hiring 10 technical team members for the Montreal office

Founded in 2016 by Harvard Law and MIT researchers and led by Jerry Ting, CEO and co-founder, Evisort provides a proprietary AI solution that can read and understand the meaning in legal documents like sales contracts and vendor paperwork. The solution allows businesses to automate the work of reviewing, assessing, approving, and tracking any legal documents that define a business action or relationships, such as contracts, statements of work, invoices, purchase orders, and SLA or rebate tables. It reads and visualizes 50 plus key data points, such as payment tables and contract expiration dates, and key legal clauses, allowing teams to focus on strategic decision making versus document processing. The system can also learn to read all types of unstructured documents.

Evisort has secured more than 100 enterprise customers this year, from high-growth startups to some of the largest Fortune 500 companies, including Brooks Brothers, Cox Automotive, Fujitsu, TravelZoo, and Sweetgreen.

Source. FinSMEs, December 19, 2019

                                                       

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Blue Canoe Raises $2.5M in Seed Funding

Blue Canoe, a Bellevue, WA-based provider of an artificial intelligence (AI) B2B platform for non-native English speakers to improve their clarity and confidence in speaking English, closed its seed round, raising $2.5m.

The round, which brought the total amount raised to date to $3.9m, was led by Tsingyuan Ventures, which has joined the board, along with Qualcomm Ventures LLC, Fantail Ventures, and more.

The company will use the funding to scale both the product and revenues, with a focus on Japan and China.

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Sponsor 

myCareBase™ is a platform for seniors and their families to find, evaluate, hire and manage home support services, to improve the seniors’ ability to remain living safely in their current home for as long as possible. The caregiver marketplace currently offers candidates in Greater Toronto and Greater Vancouver.

To compliment this platform the company also offers an innovative care management app that centralizes communication and task management among family members and the caregiver, along with a Care Concierge service to help family members with administrative, navigational or organizational tasks.

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Led by Sarah Daniels, CEO and co-founder, Blue Canoe provides global companies with ai AI platform to enable their employees to speak English clearly and confidently with customers and colleagues, and partners with English language training companies to improve and expand their offerings.

The company uses a brain-based methodology, the Color Vowel® System, which has improved pronunciation for more than 1 million learners globally. Blue Canoe scales this methodology with patent-pending speech recognition and machine learning, creating a virtual AI Teacher that provides targeted feedback. Learners track their progress over time with its objective pronunciation score.

Customers include multi-national corporations in the high tech, professional services, and enterprise software industries, and English language training companies in the United States, China and Japan, including EY Japan, SAP Japan and WE Education.

Source. FinSMEs, October, 11, 2019

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Eko Completes $20M in Series B Funding

Eko, a San Francisco, CA-based AI-powered digital health company, closed $20M Series B funding.

The round was led by Artis Ventures with participation from DigiTx Partners, NTT Venture Capital (NTTVC), 3M Ventures, Mayo Clinic, Seraph Group, and XTX Ventures.

The company intends to use the funds to drive further research and commercialization of its machine learning platform.

Founded in 2013 by Connor Landgraf, Jason Bellet, and Tyler Crouch, Eko is a digital health company building machine learning tools to fight heart disease. Its cardiac monitor combines digital stethoscope and ECG technology both for in-clinic and at-home monitoring, which enables patients to send cardiac data to their physicians. The company is collaborating with medical device and pharmaceutical companies to create combinations of therapies and data to help personalize cardiac care.

Eko will also grow its focus on clinical research, investing more in its collaborations with the Mayo Clinic, Northwestern Medicine, and UCSF. Expanding its collaborative studies will enable the company to build algorithms with robust datasets targeted to specific conditions, including atrial fibrillation and valvular heart disease, as well as congestive heart failure and structural heart disease.

Source. FinSMEs, September, 26, 2019

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Boston-based DataRobot raises $206M Series E to bring AI to enterprise

Artificial intelligence is playing an increasingly large role in enterprise software, and Boston’s DataRobot has been helping companies build, manage and deploy machine learning models for some time now. Today, the company announced a $206 million Series E investment led by Sapphire Ventures.

Other participants in this round included new investors Tiger Global Management, World Innovation Lab, Alliance Bernstein PCI and EDBI, along with existing investors DFJ Growth, Geodesic Capital, Intel Capital, Sands Capital, NEA and Meritech.

Today’s investment brings the total raised to $431 million, according to the company. It has a pre-money valuation of $1 billion, according to PitchBook. DataRobot would not confirm this number.

The company has been catching the attention of these investors by offering a machine learning platform aimed at analysts, developers and data scientists to help build predictive models much more quickly than it typically takes using traditional methodologies. Once built, the company provides a way to deliver the model in the form of an API, simplifying deployment.

The late-stage startup plans to use the money to continue building out its product line, while looking for acquisition opportunities where it makes sense. The company also announced the availability of a new product today, DataRobot MLOps, a tool to manage, monitor and deploy machine learning models across a large organization.

The company, which was founded in 2012, claims it has had triple-digit recurring revenue growth dating back to 2015, as well as one billion models built on the platform to date. Customers contributing to that number include a broad range of companies, such as Humana, United Airlines, Harvard Business School and Deloitte.

Source. TechCrunch, Ron Miller, Septembet 16, 2019

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H2O.ai announces $72.5M Series D led by Goldman Sachs

H2O.ai‘s mission is to democratize AI by providing a set of tools that frees companies from relying on teams of data scientists. Today it got a bushel of money to help. The company announced a $72.5 million Series D round led by Goldman Sachs and Ping An Global Voyager Fund.

Previous investors Wells Fargo, Nvidia and Nexus Venture Partners also participated. Under the terms of the deal, Jade Mandel from Goldman Sachs will be joining the H2O.ai board. 

Today’s investment brings the total raised to $147 million.

It’s worth noting that Goldman Sachs isn’t just an investor. It’s also a customer. Company CEO and co-founder Sri Ambati says the fact that customers Wells Fargo and Goldman Sachs have led the last two rounds is a validation for him and his company. 

“Customers have risen up from the ranks for two consecutive rounds for us. Last time the Series C was led by Wells Fargo where we were their platform of choice. Today’s round was led by Goldman Sachs, which has been a strong customer for us and strong supporters of our technology,” Ambati told TechCrunch.

The company’s main product, H2O Driverless AI, introduced in 2017, gets its name from the fact it provides a way for people who aren’t AI experts to still take advantage of AI without a team of data scientists. “Driverless AI is automatic machine learning, which brings the power of a world-class data scientists in the hands of everyone. lt builds models automatically using machine learning algorithms of every kind,” Ambati explained.

They introduced a new recipe concept today, which provides all of the AI ingredients and instructions for building models for different business requirements. H2O.ai’s team of data scientists has created and open-sourced 100 recipes for things like credit risk scoring, anomaly detection and property valuation.

The company has been growing since its Series C round in 2017, when it had 70 employees. Today it has 175 and has tripled the number of customers since the prior round, although Ambati didn’t discuss an exact number. The company has its roots in open source and has 20,000 users of its open-source products, according to Ambati.

He didn’t want to discuss valuation and wouldn’t say when the company might go public, saying it’s early days for AI and they are working hard to build a company for the long haul.

Source. Techcrunch, Ron Miller, August 20, 2019

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VeriSIM Life Raises $5.2M in Funding

VeriSIM Life, a San Francisco, CA-based company that is building digital animal and human simulations to avoid unnecessary drug testing in animals, raised $5.2M in funding.

The round was co-led by OCA Ventures and Serra Ventures with participation from Susa Ventures, Intel Capital, Stage Venture Partners, Village Global, Twin, and Loup Ventures.

The company intends to use the funds to optimize its models through expanded academic partnerships, grow a team to include talent in the engineering and operations space, and engage larger pharma institutions.

Led by Dr. Jo Varshney, DVM/PhD, Founder and CEO, a multi-disciplinary veterinary, along with a team of scientists and engineers in machine learning and in silico simulation, VeriSIM Life uses expertise in machine learning and engineering to produce models that serve as “digital” animals and humans.

The company is now looking to source additional opportunities with more partnering companies in the biotech and pharma space, inclusive of medical development impacting both humans and animals. With prior launches into partnerships and co-development with big companies, academia and CROs, VeriSIM

Life is now positioned to continue their proof of concept and fully implement solutions for companies looking to move from bench to bedside.

Source. FinSMEs, Staff, August 14, 2019

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Lucidworks Nets $100M For AI-Powered Search

AI-powered search venture Lucidworks has raised $100 million from Francisco Partners and TPG Sixth Street Partners, the company announced today (first reported by Fortune’s Term Sheet).

The funding amounts to nearly as much (a combined $109 million) as the twelve-year-old company has raised since it was founded in 2007, according to Crunchbase data. Its last raise took place in May 2018 – a $50 million Series E led by Top Tier Capital Partners. So this round is precisely double its last raise.

In a press release, Lucidworks was clear about the fact that the latest financing was not a secondary or partial exit, noting that “no existing investors sold shares as part of this financing and all proceeds will be used to fund Lucidworks’ continued growth and expansion.”

Besides Top Tier, previous backers include Shasta Ventures and AllegisCyber.

The company’s AI-powered solutions aim to  “augment human intelligence by automating tedious, time-consuming tasks to provide richer insights and real-time recommendations.” Specifically, per its website, the company works to help enterprises “make their most valuable data work for their customers and employees.” Essentially what this means, according to CEO Will Hayes, is that Lucidworks has developed a search engine that gets deployed by companies either internally or on their website. For example, Lucidworks powers the search experience for large retailers such as REI to provide “a more personalized and productive” experience for a consumer, said Hayes.

In a blog, the CEO shared some impressive growth metrics, such as the fact that the company quadrupled its value in the past year, and that its flagship “Fusion” product doubled revenue year-over-year over the last three years. He also told me via phone this morning that they company’s headcount has grown from about 125 a year ago to close to 300 today. Lucidworks pivoted in 2014 to focus on its Fusion product, which has increasingly become more of a SaaS offering, but still has a legacy open-source business that supports existing customers.

On a combined basis, the company saw 70 percent ARR growth in 2018 compared to the year prior, according to Hayes. Moving forward, Lucidworks is particularly focused on a “go-to-market” strategy around its Fusion software and enhancing its AI and data science platform, he said.

Users of its “Fusion” product include AT&T, Honeywell, Morgan Stanley, Red Hat, Reddit, Staples, Uber, and the U.S. Census Bureau, among others (according to the company, 400 of the Fortune 1000 use the offering). Lucidworks has recently expanded into the Asia-Pacific region as well as in EMEA (Europe, the Middle East and Africa).

Source. Techcrunch, Mary Ann Azevedo, August 12, 2019

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AI drug discovery company Recursion Pharmaceuticals raises $121M Series C

Salt Lake City-based biotech Recursion Pharmaceuticals, which is part of the group of companies looking to use AI technology to accelerate drug development, has raised a $121 million Series C financing round led by Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust.

New participants in the round include institutional investors like Intermountain Health, the University of Minnesota and the Texas Tech University System.

Recursion’s technology works by generating millions of cellular images and using AI-based software as a way to analyze the data set and screen potential therapeutic compounds against a variety of diseased cells.

The new capital will go towards building out the company’s machine learning-based drug development system to add new features to predict pharmacology safety and the discovery of new chemical entities.

Resources will also be directed at helping to build out the company’s clinical pipeline, which includes clinical-stage programs for neurological diseases cerebral cavernous malformation and neurofibromatosis type 2. The company also has pre-clinical programs for conditions like Batten disease, Tay-sachs disease and hereditary hemorrhagic telangiectasia.

“With these new resources, we will continue to drive toward a future in which drugs are developed—by people—with a new level of understanding about human biology that was simply not possible before machines,” Recursion CEO Chris Gibson said in a statement.

While Recursion is prioritizing its own drug development programs. the company also plans to continue to explore partnerships with big pharma companies in areas including immuno-oncology, oncology, aging and inflammation.

Earlier this year, Takeda Pharmaceutical exercised an option for drug candidates in two rare diseases based on the Recursion’s efforts and extended their drug discovery collaboration. Recursion also launched a research partnership with Sanofi to help the company identify new uses for its clinical stage small molecules.

Investors put more than $1 billion last year into companies exploring applications meant to use AI to accelerate drug discovery drawn in by the ability to apply technology to the expensive and laborious process of developing new therapies.

New York AI biotech company Schrödinger closed a $110 million earlier this year and Daphne Koller’s Insitro raised a $100 million Series A and announced a $250 million machine learning partnership with Gilead to develop NASH drugs.

Source. MedCity News, Kevin Truong, July 16, 2019 

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Amperity Secures $50M in Series C Funding

Amperity, a Seattle, WA-based AI-powered Customer Data Management platform, raised a $50M Series C financing.

Backers included Tiger Global Management, Goldman Sachs, Declaration Partners, Madera Technology Partners, Madrona Venture Group, and Lee Fixel.

The company, which has now raised total funding to-date to $87m, intends to use the funds to accelerate new capabilities, as well as expand into new verticals including financial services, automotive, insurance, and healthcare, while continuing to grow within the retail, travel, and hospitality industries.

Led by Kabir Shahani, CEO and co-founder, Amperity leverages artificial intelligence to provide a Customer Data Management platform for companies to connect, identify, and understand their customers, improve marketing performance, accelerate accurate customer insights, and enable customer experiences.

The company serves brands such as Alaska Airlines, Starbucks, The Gap Inc, Moët Hennessy USA, Wynn Resorts, Kendra Scott, Lucky Brand, Planet Fitness, Seattle Sounders, Stanley, and many more.

Source. FinSMEs, Staff, July 15, 2019

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VW invests $2.6 billion in self-driving startup Argo AI as part of Ford alliance

VW Group is investing $2.6 billion in capital and assets into Argo AI, the Pittsburgh-based autonomous vehicle startup that burst onto the scene two years ago with $1 billion in backing from Ford. The deal, which has been rumored for months, is part of a broader alliance between VW Group and Ford that covers autonomous and electric vehicles.

The Argo piece of this tie-up involves more than just an injection of capital in return for a stake in the startup and board seats. It turns Argo into a global company, or at least one with operations in U.S. and Europe. And it instantly boosts its staff by 40%.

The deal is a validation of Argo’s tech and, by adding one more customer, the startup diversifies and gains some independence from Ford, its first investor and customer. Argo is still a private company in which VW and Ford have taken holdings.

“Argo is now officially a technology platform company,” Argo CEO and co-founder Bryan Salesky said in a press conference Friday morning in New York.

VW has committed $1 billion in capital to the startup and also will purchase Argo AI shares from Ford for $500 million over three years. Ford will invest the remaining $600 million of its previously announced $1 billion cash commitment in Argo AI.

VW is also handing over Autonomous Intelligent Driving, the self-driving subsidiary that was launched just two years ago to develop autonomous vehicle technology for the Volkswagen Group. AID is valued at $1.6 billion.

The Munich-based AID team will become Argo’s European headquarters, a move that will expand its staff 40% to more than 700 employees.

“Our agreement with Volkswagen positions us as a technology platform company, expands the potential geography for deployment and will further fuel our product development,” Salesky wrote in a blog post detailing the announcement.

The deal raises Argo’s valuation to more than $7 billion. Despite the extra contribution of AID, Ford and VW Group will hold equal stakes in Argo. The remaining equity has been set aside for employees, the companies said Friday.

“This is a win-win situation,” Volkswagen CEO Dr. Herbert Diess said in the press conference. “The collaboration brings some of the smartest people in the field of autonomous driving. Together, software and hardware experts will work side by side to tackle the challenge of developing a safely deployable autonomous vehicle.”

The deal, which is expected to close in the first half of 2020, is still subject to the approval of regulators, Diess noted. Argo’s board will now be comprised of two VW seats, two Ford seats and three Argo seats.

Argo AI is developing the virtual driver system and high-definition maps designed for Ford’s self-driving vehicles. Now, that expands to VW.

For the past two years, Argo AI has done much of its testing in Pittsburgh, where it’s based. The company is also testing its autonomous vehicle technology in Austin, Miami, Palo Alto, Washington, D.C. and Dearborn, Mich. It recently expanded testing to Detroit, specifically Corktown and sections of downtown around Campus Martius Park.

Argo will treat VW and Ford as separate customers, although there will be some collaboration, which will help both companies share costs, Ford CEO Jim Hackett noted during the press conference.

This means Volkswagen and Ford will independently integrate Argo AI’s self-driving systems into its own purpose-built vehicles. Argo AI’s focus remains on delivering a SAE Level 4-capable SDS to be applied for ridesharing and goods delivery services in dense urban areas.

Source. TechCrunch, Kirsten Korosec,  July 12, 2019

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ZongMu Technology raises $14.5 million for driver assistance products

It’s anticipated that the autonomous vehicles market will reach $667.77 billion by 2026, and according to marketing firm ABI, as many as 8 million driverless cars will be added to the road in 2025.

Startups like ZongMu Technology are taking full advantage of the influx of venture capital, unsurprisingly. The Shanghai-based company today revealed that it has secured a $14.5 million follow-on series C investment led by Qualcomm Ventures, with participation from Lenovo Group’s Legend Capital and Chuangtu Investment.

The fresh funding comes after a roughly $14.5 million series B in February 2017 and brings ZongMu’s total raised to about $30 million at a valuation of $146 million (RMB1 billion). “This round of funding is of vital significance as it will not only boost the development of our technology, but will make contributions to explore more opportunities in both domestic and foreign markets as well,” said ZongMu founder Tang Rui in a statement.

ZongMu — which is headquartered in Shanghai Pudong Zhangjiang Hi-Tech Park with research and development subsidiaries in Beijing and Xiamen — focuses the bulk of its research and development efforts on advanced driver assistance systems. Solutions in its growing portfolio address lane departure and blind spot detection, in addition to things like door open warnings.

One of its flagship products is SurroundView, a camera system that stitches together four feeds from fisheye lens-equipped sensors and corrects for distortion and warped perspective, displaying the finished video on an in-vehicle screen. Meanwhile, ZongMu’s forthcoming automated valet parking, which is expected to launch in the second half of 2020, will enable drivers to leave their cars in designated drop-off areas and summon them with their smartphones, much like Tesla’s Enhanced Summon.

ZongMu also offers a “mobility solution” service that facilitates fleet management and operations, and which interfaces with third-party products and services like garage payment, parking slot reservation, and wireless charging systems. It’s complemented by the company’s Automatic Parking Assistant, which detects parking slots in lots by fusing and analyzing data from cameras and ultrasonic sensors.

ZongMu claims to have long-term strategic partnerships with a number of original equipment manufacturers and tier-one suppliers, and it says its products are currently sourced by China-based automakers and parts suppliers including Geely Automobile Holdings, SAIC Motor, and Yema Auto.

Another reliable client is Qualcomm, unsurprisingly. ZongMu and the San Jose chipmaker unveiled the Qualcomm Snapdragon 820A at the 2017 Consumer Electronics Show, which powers the infotainment systems in select Volkswagen models. (A demo at the conference used a proprietary ZongMu AI model that output multi-class object detection and road semantic segmentation simultaneously.)

“Qualcomm Ventures is glad to invest in ZongMu to accelerate pace of 5G revolution in auto industry,” said Qualcomm Ventures’ Shen Jing.

ZongMu’s revenue grew from $16,193 (RMB111,300) in 2014 to about $6.11 million (RMB42 million) in 2016, according to public disclosures, increasing by 379 times in the span of two years.

Source. Weekly Review, Kyle Wiggers, July 2, 2019

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