Big data services provider DataStory completes a $17 million B+ round

DataStory, a Chinese provider of big data and AI services, announced that it has raised a 120 million yuan ($17 million) series B+ round of strategic financing jointly led by Guangzhou Shengsong Asset Management and market research firm Ipsos. This round of financing will be mainly used for business development, AI technology investments and cooperation with third-party data companies.

According to Dr. Xu Yabo, founder and CEO of DataStory, this round of financing will also be used for research and development investment in the field of AI and other fields such as NLP and knowledge graphs, as well as the development of digital platforms. In addition, DataStory will continue to strengthen its relationship with third-party data partners, using data to provide business support for enterprises.

DataStory’s goal is to expand from the fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) industry to durable consumer goods and services. Previously, the company’s business was mainly concentrated in industries such as food and beverage, daily use cosmetics, and maternal and infant retail. Going forward, the company will focus on areas such as automobiles and home appliances.

About DataStory

Established in 2015, DataStory is a service provider that assists companies in digitizing their businesses. The solutions they provide include everything from data collection, processing, analysis, and modeling to commercial applications. Since its establishment five years ago, DataStory has served more than 200 corporate customers including Tencent, Huawei, Procter & Gamble, Unilever, Watsons, etc., spanning industries like FMCG, retail, technology, Internet, beauty and others.

Chip producer Biren Technology raises largest Series A round in recent chip industry history

Biren Technology, a nine-month-old general-purpose smart chip design company, recently announced that it has completed a 1.1 billion Series A financing round, setting a new record for Series A rounds in its industry in the “post-epidemic era.”

The investment round was led by Qiming Venture partners, IDG Capital, Walden International China Fund, and other prominent investors. It is reported that the proceeds of the round will be used to accelerate technological product development and market expansion.

About Biren Technology

Biren Technology was established in September 2019. Publicly available industrial and commercial information shows that Bicheng Technology is mainly focusing on developing original general computing systems, establishing an efficient software and hardware platform, and providing chip products and general intelligent computing one-stop solutions. The company has abundant technical expertise in areas such as GPU and DSA.

Cloud computing firm Qiniu bags 1 billion yuan in Series F round

Qiniu.com, a third-party independent cloud computing and data service provider, recently announced the completion of its Series F round worth roughly 1 billion yuan. This round of financing was led by the Chinese State-owned Enterprise Structural Adjustment Fund, with BOCOM International and Hongzhao Fund also contributing. Earlier, the company had raised more than 1 billion yuan in Series E financing from Alibaba and Yunfeng Capital. This round of financing will be mainly used for research and development and innovation of core technologies, implementation of multi-scenario solutions, and market expansion.

So far, more than 1 million corporate customers and developers have used Qiniu Cloud’s cloud and data services, including OPPO, Bilibili, iQiyi, Ping An Bank, China Merchants Bank and other well-known enterprises. Cloud data intelligence is mainly used in data-heavy industries such as mobile Internet, finance, automobiles, and manufacturing. In the future, the company plans to integrate its existing expertise and industrial capabilities of partners to build a data ecosystem and provide more value to customers.

About Qiniu

Qiniu was established in 2011 with its business model revolving around cloud computing and data services. In nearly 10 years, Qiniu Cloud has established a unified database, created a video cloud service and video data analysis platform, and a simple and open machine data processing platform.

Logistics robot maker Geek+ reveals a $200 million round raised in early 2020

Robotics company Geek+ announced that it had completed a C2 round of financing in early 2020, led by China V Fund, and joined by Redview Capital and Vertex Ventures. The total amount of financing reached $200 million.

At this year’s 4th Smart Factory Exhibition in Japan, Geek+ exhibited the M1000R Jizhijia handling robot and SLAM laser navigation unmanned forklift products that are used in the Nike factory in Japan.

According to data provided by the company, more than 10,000 AMR robots have been deployed so far, serving nearly 300 global enterprises such as Nike, Decathlon, Wal-Mart, Toyota, Suning, DHL, etc., and distributed in more than 20 countries and regions around the world.

About Geek+

Geek+ is an intelligent robot company established in 2015, focusing on the field of warehousing and logistics, providing flexible and intelligent logistics automation solutions through robot products and artificial intelligence technology. Its main business is logistics robots, as well as smart factory and unmanned warehouse solution services.

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Google has issued several updates for its Cloud AI Platform which aims to make it ‘faster and more flexible’ for running machine learning workloads.

Cloud AI Platform is Google’s machine learning platform-as-a-service (ML PaaS) designed for AI developers, engineers, and data scientists. The platform is end-to-end and supports the full development cycle from preparing data, to training, all the way to building and deploying machine learning models.

Among the most noteworthy additions to the platform is support for Nvidia GPUs. As Google explains, “ML models are so complex that they only run with acceptable latency on machines with many CPUs, or with accelerators like NVIDIA GPUs. This is especially true of models processing unstructured data like images, video, or text.”

Previously, Cloud AI Platform only supported one vCPU and 2GB of RAM. You can now add GPUs, like the inference-optimised, low latency NVIDIA T4, for AI Platform Prediction. The basic tier adds support for up to four vCPUs.

AI Platform Prediction is being used by Conservation International, a Washington.-based organisation with the mission “to responsibly and sustainably care for nature, our global biodiversity, for the wellbeing of humanity,” for a collaborative project called Wildlife Insights.

“Wildlife Insights will turn millions of wildlife images into critical data points that help us better understand, protect and save wildlife populations around the world,” explains Eric H. Fegraus, Senior Director, Conservation Technology.

“Google Cloud’s AI Platform helps us reliably serve machine learning models and easily integrate their predictions with our application. Fast predictions, in a responsive and scalable GPU hardware environment, are critical for our user experience.”

Support for running custom containers in which to train models has also become generally available. Users can supply their own Docker images with an ML framework preinstalled to run on AI Platform. Developers can test container images locally before they’re deployed to the cloud.

Customers aiming to use the platform for inference – hosting a trained model that responds with predictions – can now do so. Machine learning models can be hosted using the Google Cloud AI Platform and AI Platform Prediction can be used to infer target values for obtaining new data.

Oh, and AI Platform Prediction is now built on Kubernetes which enabled Google to “build a reliable and fast serving system with all the flexibility that machine learning demands.”

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