– Near Space Labs, a geospatial intelligence startup, raised $13m in Series A funding.
– The round was led by Crosslink Capital and joined by Toyota Ventures and existing investors Leadout Capital and Wireframe Ventures.
– Near Space Labs also announced that Crosslink partner Phil Boyer has joined its board.
– Near Space Labs is focused on urbanized areas where change happens very rapidly.
– The company has named its platform “Swifty”.
– Each one is capable of reaching altitudes between 60,000 and 85,000 feet and capturing 400-1,000 square kilometers of imagery per flight.
– The company sells the data it collects and has developed an API through which customers can access the data via a subscription model.

– Roboflow, a Des Moines, Iowa-based startup developing tools for building computer vision models, announced it has raised $20 million in a series A round led by Craft Ventures.
– This brings the company’s total raised to date to $22.2 million, and CEO Joseph Nelson says the money will be put toward ongoing product development and hiring efforts.
– The global computer vision industry was estimated to be worth $11.32 billion in 2020, according to Grand View Research. But while the technology has obvious enterprise applications — computer vision algorithms can be trained to perform tasks like spotting gas leaks, counting pills, and monitoring workplaces to enforce social distancing — companies can face barriers to leveraging it in production. Teams are often faced with rebuilding software infrastructure and attracting the necessary machine learning expertise.

– Urbanbase, a Seoul-based company that develops a 3D spatial data platform for interior planning and design, announced it has raised $11.1 million (13 billion won) in a Series B+ round as it scales up.
– This round of funding was led by Hanwha Hotel & Resort.
– Urbanbase, founded in 2013 by chief executive officer and a former architect Jinu Ha, has now raised $20 million (approximately 23 billion won) in total.

– Vouched, the developer of proprietary, AI-powered, real-time identity verification services, announced it has closed a $4.5M funding round.
– The financing was led by leading digital tech entrepreneur Darrell Cavens, alongside strategic investments from both banking and legal services firms.
– Vouched’s management team and investors now recognize the potential to verify hundreds of millions of citizen identities globally.

– Techcyte Inc. closed a $21m funding round to accelerate commercialization of its digital clinical pathology platform.
– Techcyte’s clinical pathology platform is a complete solution for digital slide management and image analysis, including a slide viewer, lab workflow and integration with whole slide scanners and lab information systems.
– It is HIPAA compliant and received the CE mark in 2020. An FDA clinical validation study is close to completion and will be submitted to the FDA by the end of the year.
– Techcyte is a spin-out of ARUP Laboratories, a leading reference lab in the US.

– Ultromics, an Oxford, UK-based company focused on advancing AI enabled cardiovascular imaging solutions, raised $33M in series B funding.
– The round was led by Blue Venture Fund with participation from Optum Ventures, GV and Oxford Sciences Innovation.
– The new investment will be aimed at accelerating the use of AI-enabled echocardiograms to improve patient care, and bring improved diagnostic quality and resource savings to hospitals.

– Iterative Scopes closed a $30m Series A financing.
– The round was led by new investor Obvious Ventures, with participation from Eli Lilly, Johnson & Johnson Innovation, the venture capital firms Breyer Capital and Seae Ventures, as well as a number of leaders in healthcare, including Lee Shapiro, Zach Weinberg and Nat Turner.
– The funds will be used to further develop the company’s core algorithmic innovations and to advance its growing life sciences businesses.
– The company is building a powerful set of proprietary artificial intelligence (AI)-driven computational tools to identify appropriate treatments and guide clinical trials for patients suffering from gastrointestinal diseases.

– Buildots has raised $30m in a series B round led by Lightspeed Ventures, bringing its total investment to $46m.
– The company will use the new funds to double the size of its global team, focusing on sales and R&D to expand its digital twins efforts, which use process mining techniques to improve outcomes as construction trades go digital.
– Buildots has early customers in 13 different countries, including Build Group in California and Washington state, MBN in Germany, Gammon in Hong Kong, and Wates in the U.K.
– While other companies focus on the design or presentation of 3D construction data, Buildots specializes in operationalizing it.
– Buildots has concentrated on the gap between existing tools for design, scheduling, document management, and process controls that provide visibility into what’s happening on construction sites.

– ZeroEyes from Philadelphia PA provides a proprietary weapons detection platform that protects schools, commercial buildings and government sites from active shooters.
– The company raised $20.9m in Series A funding led by Octave Ventures with participation from Legion Capital, Grateful Investments, Alliance Holdings, and Alpha Intelligence Capital.
– The new investment will be used for business expansion, product innovation, recruitment and further growth in North America.

– Blaize announced the close of a $71m Series D round of funding.
– Franklin Templeton, a new investor, and Temasek, an existing investor, led the round, along with participation from DENSO and other new and existing investors.
– The funding will support acceleration of the product roadmap to meet growing demand for higher performance, lower power, lower cost AI hardware and transformational AI software solutions in automotive, smart retail, smart city and industrial markets.
– In 2020, Blaize successfully released and built a multi-year pipeline for the first generation Blaize AI edge computing hardware products based on the groundbreaking Blaize GSP architecture, and the Blaize AI Studio end-to-end application lifecycle software platform.

– Algolux, a Montreal, QC, Canada-based computer vision software company, raised $18.4M in Series B funding.
– The round was led by Forte Ventures and Drive Capital with participation from Investissement Quebec, Castor Ventures, Nikon-SBI Innovation Fund, GM Ventures, Generation Ventures and Intact Ventures.
– The company intends to use the funds to achieve the following three goals: accelerate adoption of its products across mobility markets; grow its engineering and customer enabling teams to scale worldwide support; grow its engineering and customer enabling teams to scale worldwide support.

– Reconstruct, the leader in AI-powered remote quality control and progress monitoring software, announces its $17.3 million Series B funding round.
– Led by the Nemetschek Group, a global leader in construction software, along with other leading AEC companies and tech titans – EquipmentShare/Romulus Capital, STO Building Group, ThorntonTomasetti, SHoP Architects, Syska Hennessy, and Asia Pacific Land.
– This infusion of capital will enable Reconstruct’s integration with industry-leading software like Bluebeam and accelerate global expansion.
– In addition to these multi-national investors leading the round, the Company boasts 100% participation of its existing shareholders including Serra Ventures and Cultivation Capital.

– Traptic, a robotics startup, began commercial deployment of its strawberry-picking mobile robot.
– The company raised $5m in Series A funding.
– The round was led by Collaborative Fund, Homebrew Ventures and K9 Ventures.
– The company has raised $8.4m in total.

– Anduril Industries, an Irvine, Calif.-based defense technology company, raised $450m in Series D funding and a post-money valuation of $4.6b.
– The round was led by Elad Gil with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, 8VC, Founders Fund, General Catalyst, Lux Capital, Valor Equity Partners, and D1 Capital Partners.
– The new investment will be used to develop advanced technologies (AI, computer vision, sensor fusion, optics and automation) to solve some of the most important & complex national security challenges.

– Super.AI, a data process automation startup, raised $12m in funding.
– The round was joined by HV Capital, NFX, Mosaic Ventures, and PSL Ventures.
– Total funding to date is $21.6m.
– The company declined to provide revenue metrics.

– Cord, a startup automating annotation processes for computer vision, announced that it raised $4.5 million in a seed round led by CRV.
– CEO Eric Landau says that the capital will be put toward expanding Cord’s customer base and platform as the company looks to hire additional employees.
– Training AI and machine learning algorithms requires plenty of annotated data. But data rarely comes with annotations. The bulk of the work often falls to human labelers, whose efforts tend to be expensive, imperfect, and slow.
– It’s estimated most enterprises that adopt machine learning spend over 80% of their time on data labeling and management. In fact, in a recent survey conducted by startup CloudFlower, data scientists said that they spend 60% of the time just organizing and cleaning data compared with 4% on refining algorithms.

– Grabango, a provider of checkout-free technology for existing grocery and convenience stores, raised $39m in Series B funding.
– The round was led by Commerce Ventures with participation from Founders Fund, Unilever Ventures, Honeywell Ventures, and WIND Ventures.
– The new investment will be used to expand the company’s development team.

– Mendel, the company behind the clinical AI platform that understands the unstructured, natural language content within medical documents, announced it has raised $18 million in Series A funding.
– The oversubscribed round was led by DCM, a global venture capital firm, with participation from OliveTree, Zola Global Investors and Millennium Technology Value Partners.
– Return investors include Launch Capital, SOSV, Bootstrap Labs and Chairman of UCSF Health Hub Mark Goldstein.
– Olive Tree Managing Partner, Nichola Eliovits, will join the board.
– The capital will help the company rapidly grow its business and sales team to keep up with the explosive demand for clinical AI technologies by healthcare organizations over the last year.

– Mile Auto, an insurtech company from Atlanta, GA, secured $10.3m in seed funding.
– The funding was led by Ulu Ventures, Emergent Ventures, Thornton Capital and Sure Ventures.
– The new investment will be used to expand the company’s insurance offering to half of the U.S. auto insurance market by the end of 2021.

– Hayden AI Technologies, Inc. is a smart city solutions provider based in San Francisco.
– The company closed a $4.5m funding round.
– The round was led by BootstrapLabs with participation from Modern Venture Partners, UC Berkeley’s Strawberry Creek Ventures, e.Republic, and Autotech Ventures.
– The new investment will be aimed at accelerating the development and delivery of AI-powered solutions.

– Alcatraz AI from Redwood City develops secure access control solutions.
– The company raised $6.1m in funding.
– Backers included Ray Stata (lead), Hardware Club, Mucker Capital, JCI Ventures, the venture capital arm of Johnson Controls, and LDV Partners.
– The new investment will be aimed at product development and expansion of foothold in the market.

– Veryfi from San Mateo develops a data transformation platform for the enterprise and technology corporations.
– Series A $12M round was led by NewView Capital with participation from TI Platform Management and existing investor Act One Ventures.
– The new investment will be used to expand operations and business reach.

– OneSoil, a company selling technology to help farmers monitor fields and increase yields, has raised $5m from international investors Almaz Capital and Portfolion.
– The company’s tech integrates satellite imagery with mobile and desktop applications for farming analytics.
– These offerings include both remote crop monitoring and variable-rate seed and fertilizer applications that can reduce the time spent on field scouting and improve efficiency as it relates to inputs.
– OneSoil already has more than 200,000 farmers and consultants using its service across more than 180 countries just two and a half years after its launch.
– The company claims that roughly 5% of the world’s total arable land (197 million acres) is covered by OneSoil users, which include major ag companies like BASF and Krone.

– GumGum is a global contextual advertising technology company based in Santa Monica, California.
– The company raised $75m in funding.
– Goldman Sachs Growth joined existing investors Upfront Ventures, NewView Capital, and Morgan Stanley Expansion Capital.
– The new investment will be used to accelerate the adoption of its contextual intelligence advertising product suite and expand investments in key international markets.

– Hive, the leading provider of cloud-based enterprise AI solutions to power the next wave of intelligent automation, announced $85 million in new funding, bringing the company’s total funding to $121 million. The funding values the company at $2 billion.
– Glynn Capital led the $50 million Series D round, with participation from returning investors including General Catalyst, Tomales Bay Capital, Jericho Capital, and Bain & Company, among others. This funding round doubles the company’s valuation from an earlier $35 million Series C round led by Tomales Bay Capital in 2020 that included new strategic investments from Bain & Company and Visa.

– Trax secured $640m in a Series E financing round.
– The round was led by Softbank Vision Fund 2 and technology-focused funds managed by existing investor BlackRock, Inc.
– New investors include OMERS, one of Canada’s largest defined benefit pension plans, and Sony Innovation Fund by IGV.
– Trax’s cloud platform is accelerating the digital transformation of consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies and grocery retailers by providing granular visibility of rapidly changing store conditions.
– Trax solutions enable users to make timely, data-driven decisions and implement immediate corrective actions.
– As a result, brands and retailers are accelerating growth, reducing costs, and driving awareness and purchase intent.
– Trax empowers its customers to provide the best shopping experiences imaginable.

– Synthesis AI, a synthetic data company, today emerged from stealth with the announcement that it closed a $4.5 million funding round.
– The startup says that the capital will allow it to expand its R&D team and develop new synthetic data technologies.
– Self-driving vehicle companies alone spend billions of dollars per year collecting and labeling data, according to estimates. Third-party contractors enlist hundreds of thousands of human data labelers to draw and trace the annotations machine learning models need to learn. (A properly labeled dataset provides a ground truth that the models use to check their predictions for accuracy and continue refining their algorithms.)

– viAct, a construction site monitoring startup, raised $2m in seed funding.
– The round was led by SOSV and Vectr Ventures, and included participation from Alibaba Hong Kong Entrepreneurs Fund, Artesian Ventures and ParticleX.
– The company plans to use the funding on research and development, product development and expanding into Southeast Asian countries.

– Blippar closed a $5m funding round.
– The round was led by Chroma Ventures, the investment arm of Paddy Burns’ and Chris van der Kuyl’s gaming company 4J Studios, and West Coast Capital; the private equity arm of Scottish entrepreneur Sir Tom Hunter and family.
– Canadian entrepreneur Anthony Lacavera also contributed to the round through his Globalive Capital investment firm.
– The new investment reinforces Blippar’s position as the global leader in AR and will be used to further develop the company’s industry-leading technology and accelerate its growth in key markets including the US, Europe and Asia.

– Momenta, a Chinese autonomous driving startup, raised $500m funding.
– The round was led by SAIC Motor, Toyota and Bosch.
– Other participants included Mercedes-Benz AG, Xiaomi founder Lei Jun’s Shunwei Capital, Tencent, Cathay Capital and a few undisclosed institutions.
– It’s rare to see Tencent and Alibaba (or their affiliates) co-invest.

– Datagen Raises $18.5m in Funding
– The round was led by Viola Ventures, with participation from existing investors including TLV Partners and Spider Capital, as well as Michael J. Black of the Max Planck Institute, Gal Cheshik, Director of AI at Nvidia, Anthony Goldbloom, CEO and founder of Kaggle, and Trevor Darrell, founder of UC Berkeley’s AI Research Lab.
– The company intends to use the funds to grow its R&D and expand into new markets.

– 3DLOOK has seen significant recent growth, with revenue increasing by 5.6 times since April 2020.
– 3DLOOK counts more than 100 customers worldwide, including a uniform industry giant Fechheimer Brothers (a Berkshire Hathaway company) and Safariland, a leader in body armor.
– 3DLOOK is an augmented reality company that offers interactive 3D visualization of apparel and accessories.

– Datagen Technologies has raised $18.5m led by Viola Ventures with participation by existing investors including TLV Partners and Spider Capital.
– Other notable backers include Michael J. Black of the Max Planck Institute, Gal Cheshik, Director of AI at Nvidia, Anthony Goldbloom, CEO and founder of Kaggle, and Trevor Darrell, founder of UC Berkeley’s AI Research Lab.
– Datagen stands out in the fast-growing computer vision field by creating visual simulations and recreations of the real world, as a better solution to the publicly available datasets currently being used by computer vision teams which often include images of real people and places scraped off the Internet or or manually captured from the real-world using labor-intensive operations.

– Nimble Robotics, Inc. is a San Francisco, CA-based robotics and ecommerce fulfillment technology company.
– The company raised $50m in Series A funding.
– The round was led by DNS Capital and GSR Ventures with participation from Accel and Reinvent Capital, among others.
– The new investment will be used to further accelerate its hiring plans, product and technology development and scaling of robot deployments for its customers’ fulfillment operations.

– Voice assistant startup Disruptel raised $1.1m in seed funding.
– The money comes from an impressive group of investors who seem well-aligned with what the startup is aiming to do — namely, build a voice assistant that can provide detailed information about what’s happening on your TV screen.
– Investors include PJC and Progress Ventures (which led the round), along with DataXu co-founder and former CEO Mike Baker, Siri co-founder Adam Cheyer, Sky executive Andrew Olson and DataXu co-founder Bill Simmons.
– The company plans to launch its flagship product Context in the second half of this year.

– Impact Analytics has raised $11M led by Argentum to accelerate growth
– The company’s industry-leading, next-generation AI-driven technology platform powers SaaS solutions aimed at optimizing the forecasting, planning and merchandising functions for retailers and consumer packaged goods (CPG) manufacturers.
– Impact’s solutions are deployed at leading retailers, including Calvin Klein, Tommy Hilfiger, Puma, JoAnn and Belk.
– Several large private equity firms are actively encouraging their portfolio companies in the retail sector to adopt Impact’s solutions.
– Impact’s decisioning systems also enhance retailers’ sustainability efforts by helping them make more precise merchandising and allocation decisions, reducing waste and their carbon footprint.
– Impact Analytics was founded in 2013 by CEO Shachar Shemesh and CTO Lior Zalmanson.

– LA-based Metropolis raised $41m funding.
– The round was led by 3L and joined by Dragoneer, Starwood, RXR Realty, Dick Costolo and Adam Bain’s 01 Advisors, Slow Ventures, Dan Doctoroff, Baron Davis, and others.
– The company plans to upgrade parking infrastructure with a computer vision-based system that recognizes cars as they enter and leave garages.

– Evinced is an accessibility software company.
– The company raised $17m in Series A funding.
– M12 (Microsoft’s venture fund), BGV, Capital One Ventures, and Engineering Capital participated in the round.

– Labelbox, a startup developing a data annotation and labeling platform, today announced it has raised $40 million, bringing its total raised to $79 million.
– The company says the funds will be used to acquire new customers, expand its solutions, and grow its workforce around the globe.
– Training AI and machine learning algorithms requires plenty of annotated data. But data rarely comes with annotations. The bulk of the work often falls to human labelers, whose efforts tend to be expensive, imperfect, and slow.
– It’s estimated most enterprises that adopt machine learning spend over 80% of their time on data labeling and management.
– Labelbox was founded in 2018 by Manu Sharma and Brian Rieger, who both worked in the aeronautics industry, designing and testing flight control systems and experimenting with machine learning models.