TechCrunch April 7
After Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel and other Silicon Valley notables plunked down capital in a $40 million growth round for San Francisco-based artificial intelligence startup Vicarious, a few more billionaires showed up. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang, Skype co-founder Janus Friis and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff all showed up to give Vicarious an additional shot of capital in its Series B round.
The company isn’t disclosing how much extra funding they’re getting from these four, but it’s definitely not “angel-sized,” co-founder D. Scott Phoenix tells us. (I also can’t really think of a time when this many CEOs and founders of this stature got together to personally fund a company.) Vicarious is working on the next generation of artificial intelligence technology. Phoenix said that the AI field is still centered around convolutional neural network technology that was developed back in the 1980s.
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