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Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence startup, xAI, aims to secure $1 billion in equity financing to compete with industry leaders such as OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google. The company, co-founded by Musk, has already garnered $135 million from investors, as revealed in a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.
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FinTech: Stripe Shareholders Sold $1B Shares Last Month (WSJ); Company Launches ID Tool
Major investors last month snapped up $1 billion worth of shares from existing shareholders in Stripe in a tender offer that received as much as $4 billion in bids according to the WSJ.
Artificial Intelligence: Clinical Stage Pharmatech Startup Exscientia Acquires AI-Powered Allcyte
Exscientia, which uses AI to design and create drug candidate molecules satisfying complex therapeutic requirements with revolutionary efficiency, has acquired Allcyte, the Austrian company that uses AI for cancer screening. Exscientia will pay 50 million euros ($60.6 million) in a combination of cash and shares for the acquisition.
Artificial Intelligence: AI-Powered Tool From Penn Detects Certain Cancers By “Sniffing” Blood Samples
A study from researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine shows that a new tool uses AI and machine learning to “sniff” vapors emanating from blood samples and thereby distinguish between benign and pancreatic and ovarian cancer cells with up to 95% accuracy.
Digital Assets: Tesla To Accept Bitcoin If Crypto Miners Use ~50% Clean Energy (Musk); Bitcoin Jumps
At 7:30 PM ET on Sunday, June 13, bitcoin had rallied nearly 9% to $38,911 after Elon Musk tweeted that Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) would commence accepting bitcoin for its cars when there was evidence of the use of clean energy in crypto mining.
Venture Capital: UAL Floats United Airlines Ventures For Innovation In Travel And Sustainability
United Airlines (NASDAQ: UAL) announced its new corporate venture fund, United Airlines Ventures, on Thursday. The fund’s brief is to invest in emerging companies that could reinvent travel and aviation while engaging with startups that advance sustainability. These innovative companies and their technologies would help UAL meet its goal of net-zero emissions by 2050 – without relying on traditional carbon offsets.
Venture Capital: Swedish “Green” Battery Maker Northvolt Raises $2.75B
Northvolt AB, the Swedish battery developer and manufacturer said Wednesday that it closed a $ 2.75 billion private placement co-led by new investors AP funds 1-4, via the co-owned company, 4 to 1 Investments, and OMERS, one of Canada’s largest defined benefit pension plans, alongside existing investors Goldman Sachs Asset Management and Volkswagen Group (ETR: VOW3). Northvolt will use the funds to expand its battery capacity and boost its R&D efforts.
Digital Assets: El Salvador Makes History Adopting Bitcoin As Legal Tender Alongside The US Dollar
El Salvador President Nayib Bukele’s proposal to make bitcoin legal tender in the country was greenlighted by its lawmakers on Tuesday night by a solid 62/84 majority. El Salvador does not have a currency of its own and uses the US dollar as its official medium of exchange. Now, bitcoin too will function as legal tender alongside the dollar, and every business must accept it as payment.
Artificial Intelligence: AI Is “Extraordinarily Precise” At Diagnosing Sleep Disorders
Sleep disorders range from sleep apnea to insomnia, narcolepsy and many more. For the typical diagnostic procedure (called a polysomnography test—or PSG or sleep study) the patient is admitted into a sleep clinic overnight. Various measuring instruments monitor the patient’s sleep patterns and their data is then reviewed by a sleep specialist. It could take the doctor as long as three hours to analyze the readings. However, an AI algorithm can perform the same task in seconds.
Digital Assets: In Major Victory, FBI Recovers Most Of Colonial Pipeline Ransom
The US Justice Department announced Monday that most of the ransom money of $4.4 million paid by Colonial Pipeline to DarkSide, the alleged perpetrator of the cyber attack, has been recovered. According to US authorities, this gang operates from Eastern Europe, possibly Russia.
Liquid Alternatives/ESG: JP Morgan Launches ESG Liquid Alt Fund In Thailand
JP Morgan Asset Management (JPNAM) and Thailand’s Kasikorn Asset Management have jointly created a sustainable liquid alternative fund called K-SUSTAIN-UI. To be distributed by Kasikorn Private Banking, the new product will invest in the JP Morgan Multi-Manager Sustainable Long/Short Fund. It gives investors a liquid alternative product with an ESG focus.
Artificial Intelligence: Wu Dao 2.0, China’s Fire-Breathing New AI System, Is 10X Bigger Than GPT-3
Earlier this week, researchers from the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence launched a new version of Wu Dao, their own deep learning natural language model, which appears to be leagues ahead of GPT-3, the model from Open AI, and Google’s Switch Transformer. The last-named two models each represented massive advances in natural language processing.
Venture Capital: Space Debris And Satellite Tracker LeoLabs Nabs $65M
LeoLabs Inc seeks to secure safe and sustainable operations in the Low Earth Orbit (LEO) ecosystem by mapping the orbits of spacecraft, satellites and space debris. It’s a daunting task, because there are thousands of satellites, teams of astronauts, and tons of debris in the space surrounding the earth. This floating stuff moves at high speeds and has colossal destructive energy.
Venture Capital: YieldStreet, Which Brings Private Investing To Retail, Raises $100M
Yieldstreet’s mission is to reinvent an industry by providing investors access to investments previously available to the top 1%. Mom and pop investors can now access opportunities that were typically off-limits. Yieldstreet announced Wednesday its raise of $100 million via a Series C funding round.
Artificial Intelligence: AI-Powered Sex Dolls Could Develop Personalities
San Marcos, California-based RealDoll produces sex dolls, and one range possesses AI capabilities. Equipped with an advanced X-Mode system, these robots can conduct a conversation, and even display typical emotions such as jealousy and affection. They could even be AI-trained to be become more like a “partner,” mimicking their personality and responses.
Venture Capital: New VC Funds – FM Capital ($150M); Darryl Finkton Jr ($200M); Base10 Partners ($250M)
FM Capital raised a new $150 million fund focusing on the automotive and transportation sectors. Darry Finkton Jr. closed on a $200 million fund that will back founders from disadvantaged and under-represented backgrounds. Base10 Partners will route half profits from late-stage investing of a $250 million fund to create student scholarships and support university endowments at historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs).
FinTech: Paytm, India’s Leading Digital Payments Provider, Planning $3B IPO
Paytm, the Indian payments giant backed by investors such as Berkshire Hathaway Inc., SoftBank Group Corp., and Ant Group Co., is weighing an IPO worth $3 billion says a Bloomberg report. The firm is targeting a massive valuation of $25 billion to $30 billion.
Venture Capital: Black Founders Focused Collab Capital Raises $50M
Justin Dawkins, Jewel Burks Solomon, and Barry Givens founded Collab Capital in 2018 to solve the problem of capital access for Black entrepreneurs. Collab began raising its first fund in 2019 and after 18 months, the firm announced Wednesday that it had closed its Collab Capital Fund I with $50 million in the bag to invest in Black-founded startups.
Artificial Intelligence: China Testing AI-Powered Emotion Detection on Uighurs (BBC)
In a shocking revelation, a software engineer revealed to the BBC that an elaborate, AI-based system using facial recognition was being used on Uighurs in the Xinjiang province of China for detecting states of emotion on their faces.
Venture Capital: Digital Health Platform Noom Raises $540M Round Led By Silver Lake
In a January interview, Saeju Jeong, co-founder and CEO of Noom, said that there is a new, COVID-triggered trend of people seeking to lead a healthier lifestyle that includes the mind and body both. That figures, because during Covid-19, in 2020, Noom doubled its 2019 revenues of $200 million. And today, it announced a monster, $540 million Series F round led by Silver Lake.
Digital Assets: Behold, The Dawn Of A New Asset Class – Goldman Sachs On Bitcoin
In new research, Mathew McDermott, Goldman Sachs’ global head of digital assets. revealed that Goldman Sachs (NYSE: GS) clients are notably treating bitcoin as a new asset class. “Bitcoin is now considered an investable asset. It has its own idiosyncratic risk, partly because it’s still relatively new and going through an adoption phase,” he wrote.
Digital Assets: Insurance Major CNA Coughed Up $40M Cyber Ransom In March
A Bloomberg report revealed today that CAN Financial Corp (NYSE: CAN), one of the largest insurers in the U.S., was forced to pay up $40 million in cyber ransom after criminals mounted a ransomware attack. The company initially rejected the $60 million ransom demand but caved in a couple of weeks later, settling for $40 million.
Digital Assets: Bitcoin Collapses To $30K; Recovers To $40K In Wild Volatility
A perfect storm engulfed bitcoin today as a sell-off in bitcoin that was gathering pace since last week intensified and perhaps climaxed at the day’s low of $30,000.51. A confluence of factors appear to be behind the crash in bitcoin, including Elon Musk, Chinese saber-rattling against cryptos, and a risk-off environment taking hold on Wall Street.
Alternative Investments/ESG: An ETF That Aligns With LGBTQ Diversity And Inclusion, Along With ESG
Loyalty Preference Index, Inc., a wholly-owned subsidiary of LGBTQ Loyalty Holdings, Inc., announced Tuesday the launch of the LGBTQ + ESG100 ETF (NASDAQ: LGBT). The ETF provides investors with exposure to equity securities of companies that have demonstrated a commitment to LGBTQ diversity and inclusion, along with ESG compliance, as part of their corporate social responsibility fundamental mandate.
Venture Capital: Amazon And Fidelity Among Investors Backing BETA’s Electric Vertical Aircraft With $368M
BETA Technologies, which has secured multiple partnerships and order commitments for its EVAs, announced today its close of a Series A round of $368 million led by Fidelity. Amazon’s Climate Pledge Fund also participated, as did other new and existing investors. The round valued BETA at $1.4 billion, classifying it in the rarefied class of “unicorn” startups that boast of a valuation of $1 billion or more. Our brother