Dear Inside Community, Our most popular event series is coming back on May 24 and 25, and we want you to be there! Meet Our Fund 3 brings together an all-star lineup of venture capitalists ready to pitch you on what they invest in and how they add value for founders. Register here, and check out the speakers we have already announced. There will be plenty more to come in the weeks ahead. It’s going to be our biggest Meet Our Fund yet. —The Inside Team |
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 AI could play a key role in the fight against climate change, former Google CEO and chairman Eric Schmidt told CNBC. Schmid is a prominent AI investor, philanthropist, author, and served as Google's CEO from 2001 to 2011. More: - Schmidt told CNBC's "Make It" that if humans don't address climate change, "we really will be toast."
- The rate of melting in Greenland and the Antarctic ice sheet is "quite concerning," he said, noting that the industry needs to make major changes to address the challenges but they are "well worth our time."
- AI could play a role in the effort, he said. Schmidt Futures, his philanthropic initiative launched in 2017, supports the Virtual Earth System Research Institute, which has a project that uses machine learning to improve climate projections and lower model errors.
Zoom-out: - On a larger scale, Schmidt cited large language models like GPT-3 are a step toward generalized AI systems that can talk conversationally with humans and develop ideas that benefit humanity on a larger scale.
- "Imagine the perfect AI system that helps you," Schmidt said. "It knows you. It travels with you. It's on your phone ... and you trust it."
- In February, Schmidt announced plans to invest $125M into AI research. The philanthropic fund, called AI2050, will support research projects that could help tackle AI bias, harms, geopolitical conflicts, and other "hard" challenges, potentially including climate change.
CNBC 
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Stanford researchers trained a deep neural network to filter out urban noise so monitoring tools can better detect and locate earthquakes. The algorithm, called UrbanDenoiser, could reveal tremors that would ordinarily be attributed to city noise. More: - City sounds like cars and planes add noise that makes it harder for sensors to discern underground vibrations that signal an earthquake is happening.
- To improve upon this, Stanford researchers trained, validated, and tested UrbanDenoiser on ~80,000 samples of urban seismic noise and 33,751 samples of earthquake signals.
- The data came from Long Beach and rural San Jacinto. When the neural network was applied to the data sets, it could detect more earthquakes and more seismic activity than was known previously. This could help scientists better discern where and how an earthquake started.
- However, the researchers noted that the algorithm was trained on human-labeled data that all came from California, meaning it may not work very well to filter out noise signals in other parts of the world.
MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW
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 A message from LOHIKA Q: How do engineering leaders at Okta, LinkedIn and Collective define the strategy and vision for their teams? A: Register for our online event this month to find out! On April 26, 2022 at 10:30am PT / 1:30pm ET, we’re co-hosting an online event "How to Define the Strategy and Vision for Engineering Teams" with our friends from Managers Club. Vidal Graupera, Engineering Manager, Productivity Tools UI/UX and IDEs at LinkedIn will moderate a panel discussion. The panelists: The panel will discuss: - How do you define a strategy and vision in the first place?
- What’s the basis for a strategy and vision – business goals, executive mandates, other?
- What’s the best mechanism for communicating the strategy?
- … and more!
We hope you can join us!
Register Here
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Jobox.ai has exited stealth mode with $42M in funding to expand its AI-based marketplace infrastructure, which connects companies with skilled trades professionals. The startup's algorithms and data points help match customers with vetted professionals such as locksmiths, plumbers, and carpet cleaners. More: - The company also has a mobile-based operating system for skilled trade pros to manage their businesses.
- Jobox said it only collects fees from a transaction when the professional completes a job.
- It has processed $1B worth of transactions and reported $300M in gross merchandise volume and $10M in revenue in 2021.
- The $42M Series B funding was led by General Catalyst and included participation from new and existing investors, including Resolute VC, NNS, and Expanding Capital.
- Palo Alto, California-based Jobox intends to use the fund to expand its platform to more professionals and markets, as well as develop new features.
PYMNTS.COM
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Conversational AI and automation platform Uniphore announced its acquisition of Colabo, which provides an AI-enabled "knowledge solution" that extracts and uses information from documents. Uniphore plans to integrate Colabo's solution into its conversational automation platform. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. More: - The integration will help businesses extract things like relevant content and graphs from structured and unstructured data, according to Uniphore.
- This relevant content could then be sent to intelligent virtual assistants to improve their customer service.
- The acquisition marries capabilities that will give businesses new tools to quickly resolve consumer questions and "empower" agents in real-time, Uniphore CEO Umesh Sachdev said in a statement.
- Uniphore's technology combines conversational AI, workflow automation, and RPA (Robotic Process Automation). The company has an intelligent virtual assistant, U-Self Serve, that can converse in multiple languages and pass off queries to the right human agents.
- Uniphore previously made two major acquisitions: Emotion Research Lab for added capabilities in emotion AI and Jacada for enhanced low-code/no-code capabilities.
MINT
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 A message from EQUITYBEE Finally, you can participate in the success of the startup you helped build. Equitybee connects startup employees to investors who are willing to fund the costs of exercising their stock options, so they can share the potential stock value when an IPO or M&A happens. And if the startup fails? You don’t need to pay back anything. Why is this so important? - Many startup employees calculate options as part of their remuneration packages - but most of them never exercise them and never get to enjoy them.
- The average employee needs $140K in cash to exercise fully. That’s not an amount most of us have just lying around.
Interested in learning more? Visit EquityBee
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BlueOcean, an AI-powered intelligence platform for tracking brand awareness, announced $30M in Series B funding to scale its business. BlueOcean says 80+ companies use its platform, including Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Cisco Systems. More: - The startup collects information about brands and uses AI algorithms and a data engine to deliver continuous feedback about their performance relative to competitors.
- The cloud platform measures a company's brand recognition in the market, as well as the performance of specific products and the success of launch strategies and campaigns.
- It can also appraise the marketing strategies of competitors and compare ad spending to the rest of the industry.
- These efforts enable brands to take action to improve and gain market share, said CEO co-founder Grant McDougall.
- Subscriptions start at $100,000 per year.
- Insight Partners led the round, with FJ Labs participating. The San Francisco startup, incorporated as Blue Ocean AI Inc., said it will use the fresh funding to scale, make strategic hires in all departments, and invest in its AI-driven platform.
TECHCRUNCH
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🍋 MORE FRESH FUNDING 🍋 - Lilt (San Francisco, Calif.), AI-powered business translation software: $55M C led by Four Rivers, participation from Sorenson Capital, CLEAR Ventures, Wipro Ventures.
- SmartHop (Miami, Fla.), AI-platform to help interstate truckers make their routes more efficient: $30M B led by Sozo Ventures, participation from Union Square Ventures, RyderVentures, Greycroft, Equal Ventures, Las Olas VC, et al.
- Quiq (Bozeman, Mont.), AI-powered conversational platform that enables brands to engage customers on the most popular asynchronous text messaging channels: $25M C led by Baird Capital, participation from Venrock, Foundry Group, Next Frontier Capital.
- Kumo (San Francisco, Calif.), SaaS AI platform for the modern data stack that allows businesses to make smart predictions: $18.5M A led by Sequoia Capital, participation from A Capital, SV Angel, Ron Conway, Igor Perisic, et al.
- Union.ai (Bellevue, Wash.), commercial version of the open-source AI orchestration platform Flyte: $10M from NEA, et al.
For the latest on AI startup funding and more in the VC community, subscribe to our newsletter, Inside Venture Capital.
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QUICK HITS: - B2B businesses are switching to e-commerce. Now, it's your turn. Learn three persuasive approaches that communicate the value of digital to decision-makers.*
- The National Science Foundation and Amazon awarded an $800,000 grant to University of Iowa researchers working to combat discrimination caused by machine learning algorithms.
- Yoodli launched a platform that leverages AI technology from the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence to deliver feedback about a person's speaking and interview skills.
- The Manhattan Institute's Rafael Mangual made the case that Tuesday's mass shooting in Brooklyn highlights how important it is to expand the NYPD's resources, including the use of AI-enabled facial recognition software. Police arrested a suspect in the subway shooting, where 10 people were shot and more than a dozen were injured. All are expected to survive.
*This is sponsored content.
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- April 21 - Why a Disaster Recovery Plan is Vital for SMBs (Register Here) *
- April 26 - Need To Know NoCoder - Gautam Nimmagadda (Quixy) (Register Here)
- April 28 - Alternative Investments 2: Crypto Safety Standards (Register Here)
- May 12 - Making Metaverse Dating a Reality (Register Here)
- May 18 - Need To Know NoCoder: Jatin Arora (Utilize) (Register Here)
- May 19 - Understanding Fractionalization (Register Here)
- May 24 - Meet Our Fund 3 (Register Here)
- May 31 - Ethereum Merge with Anthony Donofrio (Ethereum) (Register Here)
- June 01 - Selling Consumer Goods in Web3 (Register Here)
- June 09 - Empowering Content Creators with No Code (Register Here)
*This is a sponsored listing.
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 |  | Beth is a writer and analyst at Inside.com covering artificial intelligence and daily tech news. Since starting work at Inside, she has covered various topics including virtual reality, drones, and e-commerce. Prior to that she was a public policy and investigative reporter for The Arizona Republic, where she won a Pulitzer Prize nomination and First Amendment Award for reporting on the rising costs of pensions. Reach her at Beth.Duckett@inside.com. |   | | Editor | Aaron Crutchfield is based in the high desert of California. Over the last two decades, he has spent time writing and editing at various local newspapers and defense contractors in California. When he's not working, he can often be found looking at the latest memes with his kids or working on his 1962 Ford. | |
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