CB Insights - AI has a mega-week

Hola, 

Is there anything that companies aren’t trying to do better with AI? 

The “AI for X” trend is still producing new, commercially relevant tech at a fast clip, focused on business areas from underwriting to fish farming to radiology. 

Fish farming? Yes, San Francisco-based Aquabyte says on its website that it uses machine learning to “count sea lice and accurately measure biomass in real-time while reducing cage furniture.” This sentence raises a lot of questions for me: Isn’t one sea louse one too many? What’s cage furniture and what kind do salmon prefer? 

But those questions aside, Aquabyte is a very serious company. It recently raised a $10M Series B, bringing its total funding to nearly $24M.

Our clients will know from our recent This Week in AI report that AI startups received over $1B just this week, propelled by 4 mega-rounds. 

Last quarter, the number of mega-rounds to AI startups was up from Q1 to 15.

AI has a long runway. We’re still in the early innings.

Ballin’ out 

Big tech’s investments have surged amid the pandemic — with Q3’20 seeing a record $7.9B so far. 

Check out all of FAMGA’s investments since the Covid-19 outbreak began here.

More than FaceID

Portland, OR, just passed the toughest facial recognition ban in the US, banning public and private use of the tech. 

Facial recognition tech has already pervaded several industries, ranging from healthcare to air travel. Read more about them here. 

We just unveiled our third annual Fintech 250 — the world’s top private fintech companies revolutionizing financial services. Curious about how we curated the list? 
 

Join us on September 22 at 2 pm EDT for our free webinar as we cover:

• How to evaluate the fintech field with in-depth data from the CB Insights platform
• The emerging trends and technologies poised to take over fintech
• Highlights of the most interesting companies you need to know

Let’s dissect this 

Robotic surgery has been around for more than 2 decades, but has yet to be widely adopted. With the advent of medtech powerhouses and new tech, the industry looks set to be on the cusp of a major transformation.

Expert Intelligence clients can dig deeper into the state of the robotic surgery market and future opportunities in this brief.

Before the pandemic, wellness products and services were already moving out of the store and into the home. Now, Covid-19 has accelerated the trend. And while it’s driving some wellness retailers like GNC into bankruptcy, it’s creating opportunities for others to develop innovative business models for self-care.

At the end of August, Germany-based pharmaceutical company Bayer acquired a majority stake in Care/of, which offers subscription-based personalized health supplements. The deal valued Care/of at $225M.

Care/of uses a quiz format to tailor its subscription packages to individual buyers — a funnel that translates to a wealth of consumer data. Within 4 years of launching, 5M people had taken the quiz.

Despite a decline in total dollars and deals for the wellness space in 2020 thus far, investors continue to place bets across 4 major areas: at-home tools, community, inclusivity, and sustainability. For more insights on wellness amid Covid-19, dig into our State Of Wellness H1’20 report.

Have a great rest of the week.

Marcelo