Roundup of news and ideas from the world of startups – Week ending 21 July 2019
News you can use
Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s startup Neuralink set to reveal ‘computer-brain interface’Tech & Gadgets – The company is focused on creating devices resembling tiny sewing machines that can be implanted in the human brain – to improve memory or more direct interfacing with computing devices.
Not many people know that Tesla Founder and CEO Elon Musk owns a startup called Neuralink that is developing ultra-high bandwidth brain-machine interfaces, existing only in sci-fi movies at the moment, to connect humans and computers. The least visible Musk company is set to reveal its progress in developing the technology to connect computers to human brains on July 16 during at event in San Francisco that would also be live-streamed.
Google opens its first Africa Artificial Intelligence (AI) lab in Ghana – Google is trying to position itself as an “AI first” company with research centers in Tokyo, Zurich, New York, Paris and other centers around the world. The American tech giant announced plans to open the AI research in Ghana’s capital, Accra, in 2018. The goal was to provide researchers with the necessary tools to build products that can solve Africa’s problems especially in healthcare and agriculture.
Here’s how Elon Musk plans to stitch a computer into your brain – ELON MUSK doesn’t think his newest endeavor, revealed Tuesday night after two years of relative secrecy, will end all human suffering. Just a lot of it. Eventually. At a presentation at the California Academy of Sciences, hastily announced via Twitter and beginning a half hour late, Musk presented the first product from his company Neuralink. It’s a tiny computer chip attached to ultrafine, electrode-studded wires, stitched into living brains by a clever robot. And depending on which part of the two-hour presentation you caught, it’s either a state-of-the-art tool for understanding the brain, a clinical advance for people with neurological disorders, or the next step in human evolution.
Startup Merger and Acquisitions
Philips acquires Boston-based patient navigation startup Medumo – Technology company Philips has acquired Boston-based startup Medumo, the developer of patient navigation and engagement solutions. Medumo, which launched in 2013, uses a combination of email and SMS to help hospitals communicate more effectively with their patients. The company has raised $2.1 million in venture capital funding and the company’s partners include Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard’s Brigham Health. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
VMware acquires ML acceleration startup Bitfusion – VMware today announced that it has acquired Bitfusion, a former participant in our Startup Battlefield competition. Bitfusion was one of the earliest companies to help businesses accelerate their complex computing workloads on GPUs, FPGAs and ASICs. In its earliest iteration, over four years ago, the company’s focus was less on AI and machine learning and more on other areas of high-performance computing, but, unsurprisingly, that shifted as the interested in AI and ML increased in recent years.
Japan’s Rigaku to Acquire X-Ray Analysis Startup XwinSys – Tokyo-based X-ray products manufacturer Rigaku Corporation is set to acquire Israel-based X-ray analysis startup XwinSys Technology Development Ltd., Rigaku announced Monday. The financial details of the acquisition were not disclosed. In an email to Calcalist Friday, an XwinSys spokesperson said that the company will serve as the development arm of Rigaku in Israel, and that Rigaku is expected to invest $20 million in the company over the next five years.
Startups failures
Startup Call9 shutting down telehealth services to nursing homes – Call9, a startup that provides telehealth services for the nursing home industry, is shutting down operations. The company raised $34 million in venture capital but struggled to secure additional funds to scale its business and manage the high cost of running a digital healthcare firm.
Shipitwise is Shutting Down – After four years of trying to change the way people experience logistics, we finally admit that we are too early in this game. At least 2–5 years, if not more. The Shipitwise team posted on Reddit – “Our initial idea was to build a shipping aggregator that would provide an instant dynamic shipping price to anyone. From Day 1, we decided to be different than the other first and last-mile startups around. Mainly because most of them are only solving the problem of shipping small parcels by integrating with one of the half-a-dozen big shots. These multinationals are after all the only ones that can provide an API and therefore they dominate the market for parcel delivery.”