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Investors Bet on Machine-Learning Ops; Tech Recruiter Looks Beyond Silicon Valley
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Welcome back. Startups offering artificial-intelligence capabilities geared toward the enterprise-information market are drawing investors’ attention. On top of the hype around all things AI, a handful of these ventures are lucky or smart enough to be in the right place at the right time, after years of steady growth.
Take Andela Inc., which has developed an AI-powered platform that helps employers world-wide connect with skilled IT workers in often overlooked corners of the world, like Africa or Eastern Europe. That is providing employers an end-run around fierce competition for tech talent in Silicon Valley and other traditional hubs—at a time when the corporate world has never been more open to remote work.
And as companies race to adopt AI capabilities, Domino Data Lab, an eight-year-old startup that helps large companies manage machine-learning deployments, is hitting its stride. Tech research firms Gartner Inc. and International Data Corp. foresee years of growth in corporate AI spending. Investors are betting that a good chunk of these investments will be channeled into companies like Andela and Domino.
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Domino Data Lab's platform helps companies manage the basic building blocks of machine-learning applications.
PHOTO: DOMINO DATA LAB INC.
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Domino Data Lab, a San Francisco-based AI startup that helps large corporate clients build, deploy and manage machine-learning operations—a service known by its IT-insider shorthand as MLOps—this week raised $100 million in new capital, bringing its total funding to date to roughly $228 million, The Wall Street Journal's John McCormick reports.
What it does. Domino’s platform provides a central hub for tapping compute resources, for cataloging models and for tracking models once they are deployed.
Spending plans. Nick Elprin, Domino’s chief executive and one of its co-founders, said the new funding will be used to scale its sales organization and build out its machine-learning platform’s features and functions.
Deep pockets. Beyond its investors, customers using the platform include the likes of Lockheed Martin Corp., Ford Motor Co. and several other large multinational companies, Domino says.
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Andela Rides Unicorn Status
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Startup Andela Inc.—which uses AI to help global employers find high-demand IT workers in Africa, Latin America and other regions beyond Silicon Valley, India, China and other traditional tech hubs—last week said a $200 million fundraising round led by Smartbank Group Corp. has lifted its valuation to roughly $1.5 million, The Wall Street Journal reports.
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Andela Inc. co-founder and Chief Executive Jeremy Johnson.
PHOTO: ANDELA
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Now hiring. The seven-year-old startup’s remote information-technology recruiting services took off during the pandemic as employers raced to put remote-work and hybrid-workplace strategies in place, said Jeremy Johnson, the company’s co-founder and chief executive.
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Talent search. Andela’s expansion plans come as chief information officers and other tech leaders working to find talent take a more global approach to building IT teams.
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$204 billion
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Total amount expected to be spent globally on AI in 2025, up from $85.3 billion this year, according to estimates by research firm International Data Corp.
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U.S. and EU officials agreed to strengthen export controls and investment screening to protect sensitive technologies during a meeting in Pittsburgh last week.
PHOTO: NICHOLAS KAMM/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES
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U.S., Europe Team Up Over Chips
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The newly formed U.S.-EU Trade and Technology Council aims to bolster the global semiconductor supply chain and stay ahead of competitors in the development of AI and other emerging technologies, The Wall Street Journal reports.
Leadership. The group said the two governments will seek to strengthen competitiveness and leadership by “developing common strategies to mitigate the impact of non-market practices at home and in third countries.”
Counterweight. The effort is widely seen as a bid to provide a counterweight to China, which heavily subsidizes domestic semiconductor manufacturers, among other companies in favored industries.
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“We know a big part of this is due to the behavior of China.”
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— A senior European trade official on the impetus for joint efforts by the U.S. and the EU to strengthen the global supply chain of semiconductors
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WSJ Pro AI Exclusive: Corporate AI Spending
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Gartner Inc., the global IT research and consulting firm, recently asked more than 260 tech decision makers at large organizations in the U.S., China, Hong Kong, Israel, Japan, Singapore, and the U.K. about their AI investing plans. Here’s what they said:
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Compared with other emerging technology areas, like cloud computing and the Internet of Things, AI technologies had the second-highest reported mean funding allocation, after the cloud, respondents said.
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Roughly one-third of respondents with AI plans said they would invest $1 million or more in AI over the next two years.
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The highest planned investments were in AI-enabled computer vision, at an average of $679,000 over two years.
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More than 85% of respondents with AI technologies as a major investment area said they believe industry-wide funding for AI will increase at a moderate to fast pace through 2022.
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Dialpad, which has an office in San Francisco, offers a platform that companies use for services including phone calls, videoconferences, transcriptions and online messaging.
PHOTO: MARIO ANZUONI/REUTERS
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Dialpad Hires Former Okta CFO. Cloud-based business communications company Dialpad Inc., which last month acquired Kare Knowledgeware, an AI-powered customer-service software maker, named Mike Kourey as chief financial officer, as the startup prepares for a possible public listing. (The Wall Street Journal)
Audi hit by chip shortage. After a strong start to 2021, premium automaker Audi, Volkswagen’s biggest profit maker, expects to post weaker results for the second half of the year due to a shortage of smart chips, the company’s Chief Executive Markus Duesmann says. (Reuters)
More trouble than it’s worth? From Facebook Inc. to Tesla Inc., companies are dealing with the fallout of smart software and algorithms that fail to deliver, throwing into question the readiness of AI as a prime-time commercial software tool, despite surging investments. (Bloomberg)
China sets AI guidelines. Beijing for the first time has released ethical guidelines governing AI, focused on user rights, privacy protections and cybercrime prevention. (South China Morning Post)
Brazil AI bill heads to Senate. Legislation approved by Brazil’s House of Representatives that creates a legal framework around the use of AI has moved to the Senate for a final vote. (ZDNet)
Tool predicts Covid oxygen needs. Researchers at Cambridge University’s Addenbrooke's Hospital, tech firm Nvidia Corp. and a global team of healthcare scientists are using AI to better estimate the amount of oxygen patients will require in Covid-19 treatments. (SciTechDaily)
Study tracks animal-to-human contagion. A University of Glasgow team is using machine learning to predict which viruses pose the biggest risk of jumping from animals, a cabapility that may have helped prevent the spread of Covid-19, researchers say. (The Jerusalem Post)
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Frances Haugen, who gathered internal documents showing how Facebook Inc.’s Instagram app led to depression and anxiety in many teenage girls, appeared before a Senate panel that is looking to toughen protections for children online. (The Wall Street Journal)
Qualcomm Inc. is teaming up with an investment firm to further its autonomous-driving ambitions, snatching Swedish auto-technology company Veoneer Inc. from a competing bidder in a $4.5 billion takeover. (The Wall Street Journal)
William Shatner, the actor known for playing Capt. James T. Kirk in “Star Trek,” is slated to join the next spaceflight from Amazon Inc. founder Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin LLC. (The Wall Street Journal)
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