Having spent years working in a number of fields, I am often asked what are the best things to do if you want to learn something. For example, I can think of a number of things I do to develop my own personal interests, such as learning new software, playing video games, and reading books. But one of the most interesting things I’ve learned is that you don’t have to be a programmer to learn new things, especially if you’re willing to look outside the box. The most important thing is that you have a passion for learning new things.
TOffeeAM
Founded at Imperial College in London, TOffeeAM is on a mission to make the additive manufacturing process a little less painful and a lot more fun. To date, the company has garnered seed funding from the likes of IQ Capital and the Royal Academy of Engineering. With a new found capital, TOffeeAM will be able to ramp up its game plan, which includes expanding its engineering and marketing functions as well as scouting the next big thing in the AM universe: the US. The company’s patented software has already garnered accolades from the likes of Ford Motor Company and NASA.
Varjo
EQT Ventures, NordicNinja, Lifeline Ventures and Atomico have contributed to the $54 million Series C investment in Varjo, a Finnish virtual reality headset startup. Varjo will use the funding to scale its hardware and software offerings and accelerate global expansion. The company’s customers include Airbus, Boeing, Siemens, Volkswagen, Technicolor and 20th Century Fox.
Varjo develops advanced virtual and augmented reality (VR/AR) software and hardware for industrial use. The company’s Reality Cloud simplifies the hardware requirements for running VR and XR software, and delivers streamed visual clarity with low latency. Varjo also works with industry-leading 3D engines and software tools. Varjo has a strong software team of 80 people and a hardware team of dozens.
Varjo’s mission is to bring the benefits of a true-to-life industrial metaverse to all professionals. The company offers an immersive virtual environment that blends real and virtual content, allowing users to perform hands-free video calling and image sharing. It also provides marker tracking and photorealistic virtual collaboration solutions.
Exodigo
Using artificial intelligence to map underground locations, Exodigo is revolutionizing the subterranean mapping game. This is done with the aid of proprietary advances in 3D imaging, sensors and artificial intelligence. The company claims to be able to accurately map the layers of the earth and create digital geolocated 3D maps of buried assets in a fraction of the time it would take traditional methods.
Exodigo will begin pilot projects in California and Texas in the coming weeks. The company is targeting the construction industry with a focus on mapping man-made and natural subsurface assets. It estimates that $30 billion in societal costs are incurred annually from the damage done to underground infrastructure. The company’s flagship product, the Exodigo sensor system, powers smart drilling and sustainable operations with the aid of a small portable cart.
Databricks
Earlier this week, Databricks, a data and AI company based in San Francisco, announced that it had closed a $1 billion Series G investment round led by Franklin Templeton, alongside Green Bay Ventures, Dragoneer Investment Group, Andreessen Horowitz, Andreessen Wall Street, New Enterprise Associates, and Octahedron Capital. According to the company, the funding will be used to accelerate the adoption of its Databricks Lakehouse Platform, as well as to build a broad catalog of industry solutions. This will be done in part by investing in innovations that simplify AI, such as Databricks’ own OpenAI software suite.
Conclusion
As of September 2018, Databricks has $425 million in ARR, and is expected to generate $200 million in revenue in 2019. The company’s core product, Delta Lake, interacts with corporate information stored in the public cloud, such as Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Salesforce. It has also acquired Redash, a dashboard visualization for data scientists. In a recent interview with Forbes, CEO Ali Ghodsi said that enterprises need to use data and AI strategically. He also noted that there is a democratization of data and continued advances in machine learning.
