[Software] The founder of Google Brain has raised $57 million for his A.I. start-up

[rlex]

 

Artificial intelligence pioneer Andrew Ng, the founder of the Google Brain research lab and the former chief scientist of Baidu, has raised $57 million from investors for his start-up, Landing AI, at an undisclosed valuation.

Founded in Palo Alto in 2017, Landing AI is focused on bringing artificial intelligence to manufacturing companies. It has developed a computer vision tool that manufacturers can use to create their own visual inspection software.

Computer vision software enables computers to derive meaningful information from digital images and videos. While it can be used, for example, to help autonomous cars make sense of their surroundings, it can also be used to identify a defect on a semiconductor wafer, a scratch on a smartphone screen or a dent in an auto component.

Landing AI competes with the likes of Palo Alto-headquartered Instrumental and San Mateo-headquartered Chooch.ai.

“We build tools that make it fast and easy for manufacturers to build and deploy successful AI systems,” Ng told CNBC, adding that he wants to take AI to other industries and beyond consumer internet platforms like Google and Baidu.

“We read in the news and hear the PR buzz about AI supposedly transforming a lot of things,” said Ng, a former professor of computer science at Stanford University.

“To me, I’m not seeing much of this realized yet. There’s tons of proof of concept, tons of PR, but frankly when I walk around manufacturing plants, AI is not widely deployed.”