Regardless of the well-known billions of acquisitions (such as Softbank’s acquisition of ARM, Midea’s acquisition of KUKA, and Didi’s acquisition of Uber China), according to Forbes and CB Insights, the number of corporate mergers and acquisitions this year has dropped by an overall 19%. .
Although buyers continue to buy, buy and buy, in fact, what they are looking for is a profitable and realizable target. However, both monetary and vanity values ​​have been hit hard. What should a startup company do? According to CB Insights, start-up companies can buy companies with lower valuations, or reduce the burning rate of cash and long-term losses. If they already have a solid foundation and good growth prospects, then they should keep it.
However, July's financing and acquisitions are large, and we will add some additional funding this month. It can reflect the current situation of the artificial intelligence industry and the financing level of the learning start-up companies.
Acquisition
Update: When General Motors announced in March that it was acquiring Cruise Automation, Forbes reported that their undisclosed purchase price was only slightly above 1 billion. Chuck Stevens, chief financial officer of General Motors, said in a recent earnings report that they spent a total of about 600 million in cash and stock market transactions. Expenditure of more than $600 million, including Forbes' valuation or about 400 million business and technology milestone inventions related to profitability agreements — General Motors considers this to be employment expenditure, not acquisition spending.
The acquisition of Time Domain from 5D Robotics is a provider of Ultra-Wideband product development and services. Beginning in 2012, 5D Robotics began working with Time Domain, turning the later Pulson® ranging radios into devices that provide automatic navigation and positioning for many land and air vehicles. This transformation has strengthened the actual positioning of a series of product lines in automotive automation, the wisdom of more than one hundred patents, and the combination of more than fifty employees.
Like Uber, which hired almost all of Carnegie Mellon University’s NREC developers in 2015, Toyota hired a company that provides industrial automotive software automation services in various fields, including agriculture, mining, marine, and railroads—Jaybridge Robotics. A total of 16 software developers. Jaybridge Robotics is also an independent company that will continue to serve existing customers.
Permira, a European private equity firm based in Mason, Ohio, implemented the solution and sold shares to Honeywell for 1.05 billion in cash. Toyota is also bidding at the same time. Permira acquired this company for about 500 million in 2012.
Voith agreed to sell its 25.1% stake in a German robotics company called Kuka to China's Midea and made a decision before the first bid. Kuka and Midea negotiated the contents of the specific agreement for a long time. Finally, Kuka got the protection of "workers and manufacturers in Germany will be protected until the end of 2023", and Midea agreed not to use the dominating agreement as the goal, nor would it. Withdrawal of Kuka's shares. In the end, Kuka’s management signed the agreement and two major shareholders, including Voith, initiated a tender for the United States. The public tenderer and the two largest shareholders have made U.S. have a 72.18% stake. Together with what they previously held, Midea currently owns 85.69% of its ownership. From July 21 to August 3, Midea announced another tender offer with the same valuation and share price – it wanted to win as many shares as possible.
Google bought Moodstocks, a French company that studies visual recognition and machine learning, at an undisclosed price. Moodstocks engineers and scientists have been studying algorithms for visual recognition of objects, especially those that can be detected by cameras in mobile devices.
Financing
Wonder Workshop, a robot manufacturing company based in Sunnyvale, Calif., which manufactures children's computer science and programming, raises 20 million in rounds of financing. WI Harper Group and Idea Bulb Ventures jointly led this round of financing. Later, Learn Capital, Charles River Ventures, Madrona Venture Group and TCL also participated.
UB Tech (Union Brother Technology) is a small humanoid consumer based in Shenzhen. It obtained a total of US$100 million from CDH Investment and CITIC Securities in the B round. At present, UB Tech's Alpha 2 robot, which is priced at $1,300, is highly regarded by the media and is expected to be available during the Christmas period.
Cambridge Medical Robotics, a UK company that manufactures minimally invasive surgical robot systems, earned $20 million in Series A financing. Sponsors include LGT Global Invest, ABB Technology Ventures and Cambridge Innovation Capital.
Civil Maps, a manufacturer based in Albany, invented 3D high-definition maps and centimeter-level positioning capabilities, and received $66 million in financing from Ford, Motus Ventures and three other organizations during the seeding period.
Autonomous Marine Systems received a funding of 16 million in the seeding period in February this year, which allows it to have 19 million in co-financing, all of which will meet the DoD contract to provide long-term ocean survey services.
Flyability received 43 million in financing from the MKS Alternative Investments, Go Beyond Investing, and Environmental Technologies Fund in Round A. Flyability is a Swiss start-up company that created a collision-proof drone called Gimball. Flyability hopes to use the product in the fields of detection, rescue and security.
Other related financing
According to TechSci Research forecast, between 2016 and 2021, the compound annual growth rate of artificial intelligence will reach 75%. Research in the areas of medical, automated automotive, security and access, service robotics, agriculture, cybersecurity, and other verticals will accelerate the development of smart wearable devices and head-up screens. Frost & Sullivan’s coverage of deep learning has made learning about data at different levels and forms clearer and more intuitive, and has also contributed to the development of artificial intelligence. This is where users and manufacturers think robots are fun. Frank Chen is a partner of Adreessen Horowitz, a venture capital and private equity firm in Silicon Valley. He commented on deep learning: “Since 1956, when artificial intelligence was first introduced, deep learning was a fundamental breakthrough in artificial intelligence. It is absolutely non-contradictory, and our company believes that artificial intelligence and deep learning can become qualitative changes in the basic science and technology platform, and in the past five to ten years, mobilization and cloud intelligence have been done.All the rigorous applications started from here are Need to continuously internalize deep learning and artificial intelligence, just as all computers operate with Intel chips as the core.I think all the startups we see so far should use deep learning as the new system we are hoping to witness. The basic technology of the kernel."
Remember Frank Chen's rumor that there are many companies that have recently succeeded in financing to break the line between robotics, robotics, artificial intelligence driven robots, cloud computing, and deep learning analytics.
Prospera is an Israeli start-up company that collects and provides tools that enable farmers to use new data in computer vision, data science, and machine learning to better monitor and analyze the growth of crops. Prospera received a financing of 6.75 million from Israeli VC Bessemer Venture Partners in round A. Â
Kimera Systems is a Oregon-based company that researches implanted learning artificial intelligence technology. The amount of financing obtained during the seeding period is unknown. Kimera's Nigul combines hard and soft data sensors so that they can learn and use everything in the real world, just like people. Â
FiveAI is a British startup that uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to accelerate the arrival of fully automated cars. It acquired Amadeus Capital Partners’ $2.7 million in a previous round of private equity financing.
Vision Labs, a Russian start-up company doing observing systems, received 5.5 million financing from Sistema Venture Capital in round A. Vision Labs will use this fund to improve face recognition technology.
Increase sales and expand markets in the United States, Europe and Asia. The company’s core product is an identification platform called VisionLabs LUNA, which enables almost real-time identification from video and photo streams containing nearly a million faces.
FogHorn Systems, a manufacturer of loT software for industrial and commercial vertical markets, received $1.45 million in financing from March Capital, GE Ventures, The Hive and the VC arms of Bosch, and Darling and Yokogawa Electric. FogHorn is developing an advanced smart technology called "fog computing." Its fog computing platform enables real-time analytics, machine learning models, and computing application software to run in a number of enterprise-ready scenarios.
failure
NavCPU, a mobile robot company from Russia.
Via therobotreport
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