Technology

Xage (pronounced Zage), a blockchain security startup based in Silicon Valley, announced a $12 million Series A investment today led by March Capital Partners. GE Ventures, City Light Capital and NexStar Partners also participated.

The company emerged from stealth in December with a novel idea to secure the myriad of devices in the industrial internet of things on the blockchain. Herehow I described it in a December 2017 story:

Xage is building a security fabric for IoT, which takes blockchain and synthesizes it with other capabilities to create a secure environment for devices to operate. If the blockchain is at its core a trust mechanism, then it can give companies confidence that their IoT devices can&t be compromised. Xage thinks that the blockchain is the perfect solution to this problem.

Itan interesting approach, one that attracted Duncan Greatwood to the company. As he told me in December his previous successful exits —Topsy to Apple in 2013 and PostPath to Cisco in 2008 — gave him the freedom to choose a company that really excited him for his next challenge.

When he saw what Xage was doing, he wanted to be a part of it, and given the unorthodox security approach the company has taken, and Greatwoodpedigree, it couldn&t have been hard to secure todayfunding.

The Industrial Internet of Things is not like its consumer cousin in that it involves getting data from big industrial devices like manufacturing machinery, oil and gas turbines and jet engines. While the entire Internet of Things could surely benefit from a company that concentrates specifically on keeping these devices secure, ita particularly acute requirement in industry where these devices are often helping track data from key infrastructure.

GE Ventures is the investment arm of GE, but their involvement is particularly interesting because GE has made a big bet on the Industrial Internet of Things. Abhishek Shukla of GE Ventures certainly saw the connection. &For industries to benefit from the IoT revolution, organizations need to fully connect and protect their operation. Xage is enabling the adoption of these cutting edge technologies across energy, transportation, telecom, and other global industries,& Shukla said in a statement.

The company was founded just last year and is based in Palo Alto, California.

Amazon announced some new features this morning aimed at bringing more accessibility to the Echo line. At the top of the list is Tap to Alexa (not to be confused with the Amazon Tap, mind), which circumvents the need to use voice to interact with the Echo Show.

The new feature essentially turns the device into a touchscreen tablet, by clicking the feature on in settings. Once enabled, users can choose from a number of shortcuts to add to the home screen. The list includes news and weather, along with customizable functions, like the ability to turn specific smart home devices on and off, using text inputs.

Ita simple solution, but it should offer a way into the Alexa ecosystem for users unable to audio cues to interact with the system. Itthe kind of thing that Amazon could really only add once it introduced displays into the mix.

Same goes for Alexa Captioning. The feature was introduced for U.S. customers a few months back, and now itbeing rolled out to those in the U.K., Germany, Japan, India, France, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The addition will offer an on-screen text-based Alexa responses on both the Echo Show and Spot.

Taken together, the two features should help Amazon appeal to a whole new group of users.

Gideon Brothers, an ambitious startup out of Croatia that is building autonomous robots to put to work in warehouses and other industrial logistics, has quietly raised $765,000 in funding.

The round is led by TransferWise co-founder Taavet Hinrikus, who has become an increasingly active investor, recently backing fintech Cleo, legal tech startup Juro, and satellite company Open Cosmos. Ex-Wired U.K. editor David Rowan and a number of unnamed Croatian angels have also participated in Gideon Brothers& seed round.

Founded in early 2017 and comprising a 40-plus team of deep learning and robotics experts — which includes 5 PhDs and 27 Masters of Hardware and Software engineering and other related disciplines — the company is developing an AI-powered robot for various industrial applications.

Dubbed &The Brain,& the technology combines 3D computer vision and deep learning to enable Gideon Brothers& robots to be aware of their environment and operate autonomously, similar to self-driving vehicles.

&We have been developing a technology we call a ‘robot brain&,& co-founder and CEO Matija Kopic tells me. &We believe that robots of the future will rely on the same type of vision that you and I rely on, which is basically stereo vision. We&ve deployed deep learning on top of stereo vision to give our robots a new type of perception of their environment&.

The startupfirst product is described as an &autonomous and modular intralogistics robot& that is capable of safely handling large pallets in manufacturing, warehouse and commercial environments. It is designed to work alongside humans, with minimal changes to a facility, negating the need for prohibitively expensive retrofitting or investing in brand new robot-enabled buildings, which is the route that Amazon has gone down.

More broadly, Gideon Brothers wants to help address current labour shortages in industrial logistics. Citing a research brief by DHL, Gideon Brothers says that demand for supply chain professionals exceeds supply by a ratio of six to one. The work is often painstakingly dull and physically demanding, meaning that turnover can be as high as 40 percent.

&[We use] a combination of camera-based 3D vision, primarily powered by deep learning algorithms to make sure that our robot, whatever it ends up doing, is aware of its surroundings and the dynamics that exist in these old school industrial facilities which are not highly structured or highly organised like, for example, e-commerce environments are,& adds Kopic.

&We are targeting the remaining 90 percent of the worldindustrial facilities that are completely old school, traditional and centered around human beings as the drivers of those facilities and the business model&.

In practice, this means that instead of workers rushing around a warehouse taking orders from a computer-generated voice or a scanner, and then moving several tons of product around (the so-called &man-to-goods& model), the Gideon Brothers& robot brings the goods to the worker. It receives instructions from the Gideon Brothers fleet management system, which is integrated into an operatorWarehouse Management System.

&It goes to the pallet position it has been sent to, lifts it off the frame it is sitting on and transports the entire pallet to a commissioning or &picking& area where workers take the product that need to be packed onto another customer-specific pallet. The robot then returns the original pallet back to its original position & autonomously and safely. The workers don&t have to zoom around and can focus on more complex tasks like picking,& explains Kopic.

If all of that sounds incredibly ambitious for a European startup that has raised less than $1 million, itbecause it is. However, Kopic says that by setting up shop in Croatia he has been able to recruit a very specialist team while keeping costs much lower than direct competitors. It also has the advantage of being close to a number of facilities where the startup is currently testing its robots, including being given access to much-needed warehouse logistics data.

Investor Hinrikus echoes this sentiment. &[Gideon Brothers is] building a killer deep tech team. This will be the best team of deep tech talent to the east from here (well, before we get to China),& he tells me.