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Thanks to artificial intelligence, the chip industry in Israel is getting warmer

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Avanan, an enterprise security provider for SaaS-based email and collaboration platforms, announced today that it has raised $25 million in Series B funding from existing investors StageOne Ventures, Magma Venture Partners and Greenfield Partners (a TPG Growth investment platform). Avanan’s customer base has increased 10-fold in the last 12 months, protecting over 1M end-user accounts in organizations across all industries, from startups to Fortune 100. Avanan plans to use the new funding to further accelerate its growth. Read More

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While there’s always focus on the billion-dollar-plus unicorns, there is now increasingly more investment activity taking place among younger start-ups. Venture capitalists poured a record $11.5 billion into early stage companies in the second quarter of 2018, according to PitchBook, while the average deal size reached a 10-year high of $18 million. Many companies that received some of that funding have made it onto this list.

The companies that made this year’s Upstart 100 list represent nearly every sector of the economy, from enterprise software and finance to insurance, health care and retail. They come from nine different countries and 13 U.S. states, and 19 of the 100 are led by women. All of them are less than five years old, but 28 are less than three years old and six were founded just last year.

And all of the 100 companies on the list have quickly become entrepreneurial success stories worth keeping an eye on.

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Apprente helps businesses and their employees minimize customer wait times, boost service productivity and improve consumer experiences. The company is currently focused on the QSR space, developing systems that completely automate customer food ordering processes at drive-thru stations, kiosks and on mobile devices.

“Research shows that more than half of all fast food revenue is generated by drive-thrus,” said Itamar Arel, Ph.D., CEO and founder of Apprente. “But fast food is not always fast and bottlenecks at ordering stations result in lost sales. Our conversational agents deliver human-like interactions with technology-driven efficiencies, allowing restaurants to improve customer engagement. With virtual agents, QSRs can easily improve order throughput and menu order fulfillments, and shorten queue lines by leveraging multiple drive-thru stations.”

Unlike conventional speech-to-text solutions that transcribe audio signals, Apprente’s patented sound-to-meaning technology leverages proprietary artificial intelligence mechanisms for learning and processing of speech signals to directly infer meaning from audio.

The company’s virtual agents provide an engaging, informative, natural language understanding of complex conversations, including handling corrections and revisions to ordered items, such as, “Can you make that first drink extra-large?” Additionally, Apprente’s solution offers a more consistent and pleasurable customer service experience with its virtual agents never sounding tired, annoyed, unhappy or angry.

“Our technology is closer to how the human brain processes and understands speech,” Arel said. “Audio signals are administered and directly invoke representations in Apprente’s models that are mapped onto decisions, enabling faster, more robust human-machine interaction.”

Apprente’s domain-customized conversation simulator augments collected data with realistic synthesized samples, which enables a high degree of accuracy, as well as easy introduction of custom words into the order-dictionary.

Additional features of the technology include:

• Robustness – Operational in challenging real-world conditions, including noisy environments and poor language and grammar used by customers.
• Real-time engagement – Deployable in diverse settings, without relying on uninterrupted cloud connectivity or heavy computing hardware.
• Customization – Compatible with legacy infrastructures ranging from point-of-sale platforms to call center systems.
• Natural interaction – Eliminates the need for wake words or the requirement to speak carefully and clearly.

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