No billionaire left behind. <\/p>\n
AfterMark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel and other Silicon Valley notables plunked down capitalin a $40 million growth round for San Francisco-based artificial intelligence startup Vicarious, a few more billionaires showed up. <\/p>\n
Amazon CEOJeff Bezos, Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang, Skype co-founderJanus Friis and Salesforce CEOMarc Benioff all showed up to give Vicariousan additional shot ofcapital in its Series B round. <\/p>\n
The company isnt disclosing how much extra fundingtheyre getting from these four, but its definitely not angel-sized, co-founder D. Scott Phoenix tells us. (I also cant really think of a time when this many CEOs and founders of this stature got together to personally fund a company.) <\/p>\n
Vicariousis working on the next generation of artificial intelligence technology.Phoenix said that the AI field is stillcenteredaroundconvolutional neural network technology thatwas developed back in the1980s. <\/p>\n
But by more closely mimicking how the brain works, Phoenix and his neuroscientist co-founderDileep George say that theyve been able to make breakthroughs in performance and speed. Last fall, they showed off a way to solve Captcha queries. <\/p>\n
Theyre hoping that Vicarious technology will eventually lead to the worlds first intelligent machines. <\/p>\n
The company is still incredibly small at this point, with more than $56 million raised for a headcount of 10 employees (which sounds crazy). But Phoenix said theyre planning to ramp up headcount dramatically. <\/p>\n
Vicariouss other investors include Joe Lonsdales Formation 8; Vinod Khosla; Ashton Kutcher; Aydin Senkuts Felicis Ventures; Garry Tan and Alexis Ohanians Initialized Capital; Bryan Johnston of Braintree; Box.com CEO Aaron Levie; Sam Altman; Open Field Capital; Zarco Investment Group; and Metaplanet Holdings. <\/p>\n
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See the article here: <\/p>\n
Artificial Intelligence Startup Vicarious Grabs Funding From Bezos, Benioff And Jerry Yang<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" No billionaire left behind. Continue reading