AI-assisted patient monitoring startup Biofourmis said it has raised a $300M funding round that values the company at nearly $1.3B. The Boston-based company uses AI, sensors, and software to remotely monitor patients. It analyzes biomarkers such as heart and respiration rates to predict worsening health conditions for earlier intervention. More: - The Series D round, led by growth equity firm General Atlantic, included participation from CVS Health and others.
- The cash injection will enable Biofourmis to pay for clinical trials of its digital therapeutics, scale up its virtual care offerings, and pursue possible M&A and strategic partnerships, according to the company.
- Intel board chairman Omar Ishrak will also join Biofourmis's board of directors as chairman. Ishrak is the former CEO of Medtronic and was president and CEO of GE Healthcare Systems.
- Biofourmis said it has raised $445M to date.
FORBES 
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Adept, an AI research lab working on a universal AI collaborator to assist people with tasks, has emerged from stealth and announced a $65M round of funding. The SF-based lab said it is building AI systems that could one day automate most if not all software processes. Its focus is on developing "general intelligence by enabling people and computers to work together." More: - Adept was founded by CEO David Luan, a Google Research director who leads large models efforts at Google.
- Co-founders include Ashish Vaswani (chief scientist) and Niki Parmar (CTO), former Google Brain researchers who co-authored the deep learning model known as the Transformer.
- Transformers are used mainly for natural language processing and computer vision. The language-creating model GPT-3, for example, is based on the Transformer architecture.
- In a statement, Luan said Transformers and related applications are the biggest step toward "general intelligence," which would require Transformers that can "act" in addition to writing and reading.
- Adept is training a neural network to use every software tool and API that's available right now, Luan explained. The idea is to create a collaborator system that can respond to commands at computers and take on tasks, freeing up humans to focus on other work.
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Chatbots are becoming more commonplace, but consumers are not eager to use them, according to new research from Simplr. The platform found that 18% of consumers have used a chatbot in the last three months, up from 9% in 2020. Even then, about half of consumers rated their willingness to converse with a bot as "neutral." More: - According to Simplr, the results could indicate that chatbots are lacking in quality vs. quantity.
- The research is based on a survey of 1,000 U.S. adults from Feb. 24 to March 3, 2022.
- In the survey, 80% of people said they would be more willing to use a chatbot if they could quickly and easily transfer to a live person.
- Consumers said they were willing to wait 13 minutes on average to be transferred to a human.
Zoom-out: - The research also revealed generational differences in using chatbots:
- 20% of Gen Z respondents preferred starting with a chatbot in customer interactions vs. 4% of Boomer respondents.
- 53% of Boomer consumers said uninitiated chatbots "annoyed" them vs. 28% of millennials and 24% of Gen Z consumers.
- Overall, only 20% of consumers said they were pleased to see a chatbot pop up on a website when they didn't actively need help.
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Baseten, a company that accelerates the time it takes to turn machine learning models into practical apps, has announced its official launch along with $20M in funding. The startup says its tool helps machine learning teams incorporate their models into production-grade applications "within hours" rather than months. More: - Baseten was founded by Tuhin Srivastava (CEO), Amir Haghighat (CTO), and Philip Howes (chief scientist), who previously worked for the e-commerce platform Gumroad.
- With Baseten, they said their goal is to help businesses more easily incorporate machine learning into their products and operations without requiring full engineering knowledge.
- The product, which launched in private beta last year, is now in public beta. Brands are currently using it in areas like abuse detection and fraud prevention.
- Baseten said it also raised $8M in seed funding, co-led by Greylock and South Park Commons Fund, as well as $12M in Series A funding led by Greylock.
- The capital injection will help it grow its engineering and go-to-market teams.
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DARPA has awarded a contract to Intel and partners to develop simulation environments for autonomous off-road vehicles. The award is for DARPA's RACER-Sim program, which aims to develop new off-road simulation platforms. These new platforms can lower development costs and "bridge the gap between simulation and the real world," according to DARPA. More: - The contract went to Intel Federal LLC, with support from Intel Labs and its collaborators, the University of Texas at Austin, and the Computer Vision Center in Barcelona.
- RACER-Sim will have two phases.
- In the first phase, Intel will create new simulation platforms and map generation tools.
- The second phase will integrate algorithms to accelerate R&D and eventually result in the simulated training and testing of robots.
- The idea is to reduce costs and speed up deployment of these technologies.
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- Mayo Clinic and AI software developer Vuno signed an agreement to co-develop AI/ML algorithms for more precise cancer diagnosis and treatment.
- Softbank's Arm announced its Cortex-M85 microcontroller, which was designed to improve voice recognition and other AI operations on edge devices, including drones and smart-home products.
- DARPA awarded a $1M federal grant to Arizona State University professor Pavan Turaga to improve the way AI identifies objects in images.
- AI consulting startup Navikenz secured $4M in seed funding to expand its India and U.S. teams.
- Intentsify, a developer of software for B2B marketing and sales, has hired former HubSpot AI lead Marco Lagi as its VP of artificial intelligence.
- Conversational AI software provider Loris announced a $12M Series A funding round. The startup's AI-based no-code solution helps human customer support agents improve their communications.
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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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