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November 25, 2014

AI Startup Raises $103.5M to Expand Development

Artificial intelligence startup Sentient Technologies said it would use the $103.5 million raised in its most recent funding round to expand its distributed AI products and services.

San Francisco-based Sentient said Nov. 24 that the Series C funding round boosts the amount of venture funding raised so far to $143 million. Access Industries led the latest round along with Tata Communications. Existing investors include Horizon Ventures and a group of private investors in the financial, consumer and real estate sectors.

Access Industries is also an investor in Tata Communications along with Spotify and Warner Brothers.

Sentient is demonstrating its distributed AI capabilities through collaborative research with Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and other partners. Testing focuses on medical research, financial trading and other market sectors. The company also said it selected these “vertical proving grounds” owing to their large datasets, variety of data types and the complexity of decision making associated with these sectors.

The startup claims to operate distributed AI on a massive scale, running multiple AI jobs on millions of AI processing nodes. The results are validated based on large and complex datasets. Sentient’s approach leverages “deep learning”—machine learning designed to continuously evolve and improve—that allows researchers and data scientists to solve mission-critical problems.

Sentient claims its patented approach to distributed AI addresses the asynchronous nature of growing amounts of data in order to speed analytics. While leveraging machine and deep learning to identify patterns and make predictions, Sentient said its distributed AI platform seeks to build on predictions to improve decision making using “evolutionary algorithms at a massive scale.”

“In artificial intelligence, we are beginning to see that it’s not only about ‘big data,’ but also about ‘big compute,’ which gives the ability to search deeper and at a higher complexity to find the patterns and answers hidden within,” Sentient advisor Adam Cheyer, co-founder and vice president of engineering at Viv Labs, said in a statement announcing the funding round.

With the latest infusion of venture funding, Sentient also said it is seeking new partners to collaborate on product development in areas like healthcare, medical research, e-commerce, fraud detection and public safety. Meanwhile, it is developing APIs that would enable “more independent partner development.”

MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory has worked with Sentient on blood pressure predictive analytics research that could be used by hospital intensive care units. The key to successful development was the massive scale of the Sentient’s distributed AI platform, MIT researchers said.

Sentient also said Hong Kong-based Tata Communications would provide datacenter space along with managed hosting and networking. Tata also will partner to develop additional products and services as well as aiding Sentient’s global deployment efforts.

Also working with the AI startup is Hutchinson Whampoa, the international conglomerate operating businesses spanning port facilities and telecommunications to manufacturing and energy.

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