Appen acquires Figure Eight for up to $300M, bringing two data annotation companies together

Appen just announced that it’s acquiring Figure Eight in an all-cash deal that sees Appen paying $175 million upfront, with an additional payment of up to $125 million based on Figure Eight’s performance this year. Both companies focus on using crowdsourced labor pools to annotate data, which in turn is used to train artificial intelligence and […]

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Healthcare wearables level up with new moves from Apple and Alphabet

Announcements that Apple has partnered with Aetna health insurance on a new app leveraging data from its Apple Watch and reports that Verily — one of the health-focused subsidiaries of Google‘s parent company — Alphabet, is developing a shoe that can detect weight and movement, indicate increasing momentum around using data from wearables for clinical health applications and […]

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Kite raises $17M for its AI-driven code completion tool

Kite, a San Francisco-based startup that uses machine learning to build what is essentially a very smart code-completion tool, today announced that it has raised a $17 million funding round. The round was led by Trinity Ventures, with personal participation from now-GitHub CEO Nat Friedman. In addition to the funding, Kite also today announced that […]

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With a new deal for customers and a fresh $23 million, Mayvenn extends its hair care business

Pitching customers a new, all-inclusive service for buying and installing hair, Mayvenn is looking to significantly expand its haircare business and just raised $23 million in a new round of funding to do it. The new financing was led by Essence Ventures — and it represents the first outside investment by the  holding company owned […]

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Ne-Yo wants to make Silicon Valley more diverse, one investment at a time

Ne-Yo made his first investment in the coding academy Holberton School about a year ago. This month, he visited the campus for its grand opening and spoke to TechCrunch about his Silicon Valley ambitions.

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SynapseFI raises $17M to develop its fintech and banking platform

SynapseFI, a startup that helps banks and fintech companies work together to develop technology, has announced that it raised a $17 million Series A funding round. The funding actually closed at the back end of last year, but CEO Sankaet Pathak said the company has been so busy developing new products, hiring and more than that […]

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Weights & Biases raises $5M to build development tools for machine learning

Machine learning is one of those buzzwords that nearly every tech company likes to throw around nowadays — but according to Lukas Biewald, it represents a genuinely new approach to programming. “Software has eaten a lot of the world, and machine learning is eating software,” Biewald said. In his view, there are “fundamental” differences between the […]

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