Facial recognition: SenseTime raised $1.5 billion ahead of a public listing on Shanghai’s STAR market, Reuters reports. Last year, the White House placed the Chinese AI startup on its Entity List.
Quantum: Rigetti Computing, a Berkeley, CA-based quantum startup, recently raised a $79 million Series C.
Chips: Syntiant, a California startup that makes chips for AI voice applications, announced a $35 million Series C last week. AI hardware is getting more and more specialized.
Virtual reality: Varjo announced a $54 million Series C this week. The Finnish startup wants to build VR and extended reality technologies with human-eye-level resolution. Its recent devices are uber-expensive ($5,900–$7,000 a pop) and designed for high-fidelity applications like flight simulation.
Something in the water: Vicarious Surgical, a Cambridge, MA-based surgical robotics platform developer, raised $13.2 million this week. They weren’t the only Massachusetts robotics startup getting in on the action: Root AI, which makes agricultural harvesting bots, raised $7.2 million in seed funding (ha, harvesting and seeds).
- The crop of robot startups in Greater Boston is a positive spillover from MIT and another school in Cambridge.
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