Artificial intelligence is again one of the hottest investment sectors. Deal activity is up year on year and new venture capital funds focused on AI are born every quarter.
Artificial Intelligence deals
Companies like Google, Apple and Facebook are building new teams from scratch, betting in moonshots and acquiring talents for AI talents and technologies. A landmark deal has been the DeepMind acquisition made by Google in 2014 for an estimated price of over $400 million.
Google DeepMind was based in London and set to solve the ambitious goal of “solving intelligence”. Recently it had extensive press coverage, including several articles published on Nature, documenting their reinforcement learning algorithms applied to the old Atari video games, and ultimately able to achieve super human performances. The following challenge they set for themselves is beating the world champion of Go, an ancient Chinese strategy game, played in a 19x19 board and considered harder than chess since it requires an high degree of intuition and long-term planning.

In gaming, Super Mario Bros is an old game challenged by artificial intelligence practitioners, building machines and agents. As the creator of the Mario AI Championship would say: “AI and machine learning are in constant need of better benchmarks. In reinforcement learning, the choice has long stood between simplistic toy problems such as pole balancing and the Mountain Car, and complex, slow and nonreplicable robot problems. Within the CI/AI in Games community, a series of competitions has grown up where competitors submit controllers for modified or reconstructed versions of existing computer games. Using existing computer games as AI benchmarks brings several benefits, the most important being that the games are almost guaranteed to contain interesting AI challenges by virtue of being popular among human players.”
Besides games, Artificial Intelligence startups focus on improving workflow and productivity in the enterprise, robotics, mobility and apply to several verticals. AI is now used by startups to augment their B2B SaaS enterprise offerings and often categorised as machine intelligence startups.