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The latest from the evolving AI channel: 30 July

The latest from the evolving AI channel: 30 July

There is always an abundance of AI technology announcements, here are some interesting ones that can aid the channel.

-AI agents are poised to change the world, but they can't read the documents that run it, says startup Retab. The firm, founded by engineers “frustrated” by the “broken state of document AI”, has raised $3.5m in pre-seed funding to try and fix the problem.

The round was backed by VentureFriends, Kima Ventures, and K5 Global, alongside Eric Schmidt (via StemAI), Olivier Pomel (CEO, Datadog), and Florian Douetteau (CEO, Dataiku). The new capital will support platform development and community growth, as the company scales its infrastructure to meet rising demand from vertical AI startups and internal innovation teams alike.

Retab is a developer platform and SDK that redefines everything about document processing in the age of large language models. Developers define the schema of the data they need, and Retab handles the rest - from dataset labelling and evaluations, to automated prompt engineering and model selection.

“People keep building demos that look like magic, but break the moment you put them into production,” said Louis de Benoist, co-founder and CEO of Retab. “We lived that pain ourselves, wiring up fragile pipelines just to extract a few fields from a PDF. We built Retab because it’s the developer-first platform we always wished we had.”

-Datavault AI has announced the expanded commercialisation of its flagship AI agents DataScore and DataValue, built with IBM watsonx.ai. IBM is also committing AI engineering talent and “deep technical expertise” over multiple years to help Datavault expand and accelerate the impact of its offerings for clients.

Datavault’s solution is designed to help customers streamline their enterprise financial modelling, risk assessment, and pricing strategies across on-premises, cloud, and hybrid environments.

As a Platinum IBM Partner, Datavault AI will collaborate with IBM’s salesforce and partner network to accelerate Datavault’s customer engagement and buy-in, through the IBM Partner Plus programme. There are plans to collaborate on deployment, testing, and development, to help accelerate AI adoption across key industries, including finance, healthcare, sports, entertainment, and government.

-ThoughtSpot, the agentic analytics platform company, has made its Agentic Model Context Protocol (MCP) Server generally available, “ushering in a new era of AI interoperability in agentic analytics”, it says.

As businesses increasingly explore and build custom AI agents, they often encounter a critical gap: the lack of robust analytics capabilities to deliver true self-service and trusted, context-aware insights wherever their users engage.

This is because development typically doesn’t have adequate time, resources and analytics expertise to build the analytical infrastructure and integrations needed for self-service when it comes to enterprise data. The result is powerful AI tools lacking the visibility and actionable insights needed to drive value.

ThoughtSpot’s Agentic MCP Server fulfils this need, accelerating time to insights for business and data teams by enabling them to discover insights and perform deep analysis on their structured enterprise data directly within their existing tools.

The Agentic MCP Server allows businesses to “seamlessly integrate” ThoughtSpot’s agentic analytics capabilities into their AI agents, platforms, and interfaces that support MCP, including Claude, Gemini and ChatGPT.

-Data management player Arctera has updated its Insight Platform to “empower” organisations to “radically reduce” the compliance risks associated with AI deployments.

Many highly regulated organisations are not able to fully maximise the opportunities of AI – especially public AI tools – because they are unable to manage and control how they’re used. Often, organisations lack the ability to monitor what’s being shared in a prompt, record the use of AI, or to block the accidental upload of sensitive data.

Arctera Insight promises to changes this. The new capabilities enable organisations to capture the input and output of LLMs, chronicle AI data, and integrate it with wider employee data, to “unlock” corporate insight, and contain the upload of sensitive data to public AI tools.

-Unified file data platform Nasuni has released File IQ Premium and Ops IQ, two sets of intelligence dashboards that “enhance” how enterprises gain insight from their unstructured file data and machine data, respectively.

The new capabilities within the Nasuni File Data Platform enable global IT teams to “go beyond storage and security”, turning massive volumes of file data into a source of actionable insights for operational agility, and AI readiness.

-Customer service vendor Cognigy has struck a strategic partnership with TeKnowledge, a global tech services provider, to jointly deliver agentic AI solutions, that will enable enterprises to scale personalised, autonomous customer service across voice and digital channels.

As organisations shift from basic chatbots to fully capable AI agents, Cognigy and TeKnowledge are teaming up to make execution “faster, easier, and outcome-focused”.

The partnership combines Cognigy’s agentic AI platform with TeKnowledge’s AI-first technology services expertise to bridge the gap between strategy and implementation.

-Scrunch AI, the company helping brands understand and improve how they appear in AI search, has announced a $15m Series A funding round led by Decibel, with participation from Mayfield, Homebrew, and other strategic investors.

The raise follows a period of rapid growth. Over the past three months alone, Scrunch has grown its paying customer base by more than 50% month-over-month. Today, over 500 brands utilise the platform to monitor and enhance their visibility in AI search results.

Nearly all growth to date has come through inbound demand, with customers reporting an average 40% increase in referral traffic, and up to 4x improvement in visibility across generative platforms.

-Yellow.ai, a provider of conversational agentic AI that delivers “autonomous, human–like experiences” at enterprise scale, has announced the availability of AI agents for EX and CX in the new AI Agents and Tools category of AWS Marketplace.

The enterprise-grade AI agents help organisations automate voice, chat, email, and more across over 35 channels in over 135 languages, enabling customers to reduce operational costs, boost customer satisfaction, and scale 24×7 support with “minimal engineering effort”, said Yellow.ai.

-IT solutions provider Hyperlink InfoSystem has launched Clever247.ai, an “advanced” conversational AI platform that enables businesses to fully automate their sales and support calls.

Designed for companies of all sizes across diverse industries, Clever247.ai helps organisations handle every incoming call with “intelligence, speed, and consistency - 24 hours a day, 7 days a week”, we are told.

Clever247.ai uses advanced natural language processing and speech recognition technologies to understand caller intent in real time and respond accordingly. It's designed to integrate “seamlessly” with existing CRM software, appointment systems, and order management tools, making it easier for businesses to adopt the solution without disrupting their current workflows.

-Databricks has continued its rapid growth in the San Francisco Bay Area with the expansion into a new 305,000 sq ft office in downtown Sunnyvale. The office is designed to support the company's “accelerated hiring efforts”.

The vendor’s South Bay R&D team has doubled over the past two years, with projections it will double again over the next two years, even as the company “aggressively leverages” its own platform and AI to deliver new products faster.

“This rapid growth is fuelled by increasing enterprise demand for the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform, underscoring the company's pivotal role in powering data and AI innovation,” said the firm.

Located at 200 West Washington, the strategic location in Sunnyvale allows Databricks to “deepen partnerships” with its many South Bay customers, including Adobe, Barracuda Networks, Cisco, Intuit, McAfee, Netgear and NVIDIA, while also positioning the company to reach new customers.

In March, the company announced a new headquarters at One Sansome Street, San Francisco, committed $1 billion to its San Francisco operations over the next three years, and confirmed a five-year extension of its Data + AI Summit in San Francisco.

The company's expanded presence in Sunnyvale will open up a variety of roles across all functions.

-SYSPRO, a global software provider for the manufacturing and distribution industries, has sealed a strategic partnership with Versori, the UK-based provider of AI-driven integration platforms.

“This collaboration marks a major step in SYSPRO's vision to become the most connected and agile ERP provider in the mid-market,” said SYSPRO, “enabling rapid deployment of integrations and unlocking scalable innovation across its customer and partner ecosystems”.

Through Versori's agentic integration platform, SYSPRO will launch an initial 25 pre-built, production-ready integrations over the next six months. These will span key vertical systems in logistics, e-commerce, CRM, HCM, and PLM. All integrations will be “easily accessible” via the new SYSPRO Connector Marketplace, offering customers a “plug-and-play” experience with the ability to trial solutions before deployment.

By removing the complexity and cost typically associated with ERP integrations, the strategic partnership gives SYSPRO customers the ability to streamline operations, reduce implementation timelines, and bring solutions to market faster.

-Sevii, an enterprise threat management and remediation provider, has launched an autonomous defence and remediation (ADR) platform, that harnesses advanced agentic AI technology to “neutralise adversaries in real-time” - “without the need for human intervention”.

With the advent of “dark AI”, says the firm, adversaries are executing attacks at “unprecedented speed and scale”, with breakouts occurring in under a minute.

Internal security teams and outsource providers alike are challenged to keep pace. The result is often remediation that takes hours, an “untenable delay” that gives attackers an unsustainable advantage when moving deeper into the customer's enterprise, said Sevii, complicating remediation efforts while dramatically increasing risk.

"This is a pivotal moment in cybersecurity," said Curt Aubley, CEO and co-founder of Sevii. "Security teams can no longer afford to wait hours or days to respond. Existing SOC architectures and legacy SIEM/SOAR platforms lead to response latency, high ingestion and maintenance costs, and inadequate outcomes. New cutting-edge platforms are needed to act faster than adversaries can launch their attacks, stopping threats before they can proliferate.”

The Sevii ADR platform is now available for both private and public sector customers. The platform leverages NVIDIA's accelerated computing for real-time AI inference, tailored specifically to meet unique cyber defence requirements.

-Qubrid AI, which provides hybrid GPU cloud solutions and AI infrastructure and tools, has announced a major upgrade to its GPU Cloud Rental Platform, with the introduction of Ready-to-Deploy One-Click AI/ML Templates, a flexible developer interface, and expanded GPU rental options.

The new features are designed to streamline AI workflows, enhance user experience, and make high-performance and GPU accelerated computing more accessible to AI developers, researchers, startups and enterprises.

New GPU rental options include short-term on-demand, weekly and monthly rentals, as well as long-term quarterly, six-monthly and annual GPU reservations, “ensuring maximum flexibility and cost efficiency”.

“With these enhancements, we're bringing the fastest path from idea to production for AI teams,” said Pranay Prakash, CEO of Qubrid AI. "Our ready-to-deploy AI/ML templates and flexible GPU development environments mean that users can focus on building innovative AI applications instead of dealing with complex infrastructure setups."

-Tech Mahindra has launched TechM Orion, a “next-generation” AI agent development and deployment platform powered by NVIDIA accelerated computing. The platform is designed to help enterprises scale AI adoption “responsibly and efficiently”, with a focus on governance, transparency, and tangible business outcomes.

TechM Orion enables cloud, on-premise, and hybrid deployments, allowing “seamless integration” with clients' systems and third-party tools, to maximise existing AI investments and support scalable growth.

As well as NVIDIA accelerated computing, TechM Orion is built using the NVIDIA AI Enterprise software suite, leveraging NVIDIA NIM, NVIDIA NeMo, and NVIDIA RAPIDS for efficient AI inference, model training and customisation.

-Onix, a provider of data, cloud, and AI solutions, and a 16-time Google Cloud Partner of the Year, has acquired the professional services business unit of UJET, a cloud-native contact centre as-a-service (CCaaS) software provider. The strategic acquisition enhances Onix's position as a premier Google Cloud partner, accelerating the delivery of next-generation, AI-driven customer engagement solutions, said Onix.

UJET's platform, built entirely on Google Cloud and deeply integrated with Google's Customer Engagement AI Suite (CES), can help enterprises transform customer experiences using generative AI. With the addition of UJET's professional services team, Onix gains expertise in deploying CES solutions globally.

-E2B, a provider of open-source cloud infrastructure specifically designed for AI agents, has raised a $21m in a Series A funding round, led by Insight Partners, with participation from Decibel, Sunflower Capital, and Kaya, along with prominent angels such as Docker's former CEO Scott Johnston.

The investment will enable E2B to accelerate the expansion of its cloud infrastructure offerings, enhance its open-source interoperability with other infrastructure providers, and scale its enterprise-focused engineering and go-to-market teams globally, E2B said.

Send your evolving AI channel news to: a_savvas@yahoo.co.uk