Lily AI Announces $12.5M Series A

MaintainPR client Lily AI is a female led (and coded) platform focused on using deep learning to help brands better convert customers through emotionally tailored recommendations.

The experienced team, including SXSW Award winner Purva Gupta and former Box/Yahoo tech lead Sowmiya Chocka Narayanan, have recently announced a $12.5 million Series A led by Canaan Partners. Prior investors NEA, Unshackled and Fernbrook Capital also took part in the funding event.

Read more on TechCrunch for how a personal shopping pain point from Purva led to leading AI and Machine Learning solving multiple issues for big brands and retailers.

“Lily AI raises a $12.5M Series A led by Canaan to accelerate its e-commerce recommendation tech” — TechCrunch

Arago CEO Envisions AI-empowered Fashion Supply Chain

Chris Boos, Arago founder and CEO, recently weighed in on the impact of AI in fashion forecasting and supply chain management in an OpEd for Business of Fashion. In the piece, Boos determines that AI chatbots and and automated "shortcuts" that leverage AI may not be the best application in an age where boutique brands need to differentiate on customer service. He points instead to the recent overproduction that cost H&M shareholder dearly and recommends AI in the supply chain.

The Business of Fashion has gained a global following as an essential daily resource for fashion creatives, executives and entrepreneurs in over 200 countries.

Read the full OpEd: How Fashion Should (and Shouldn’t) Embrace Artificial Intelligence -- Business of Fashion

Arago's CEO Chris Boos in WSJ on Positive Future with AI

With all of the dire predictions that some AI-practitioners like to dispel in order to drum up press, it's nice to hear a more balanced and productive counterpoint.

Marketwatch's Rachel Koning Beals recently spoke with MaintainPR client Arago on what a realistic future would look like with automation.

No need to squirm in your seat here because Chris Boos (Arago's CEO) has already been implementing AI for Fortune 100 companies in finance/IT and telecom for years!

AI is too smart and busy to knock off humans - WSJ/Marketwatch

Introducing Digital Vertices

Rene Buest, Director of Technology Research at Arago, recently started a blog named "Digital Vertices" on the CIO Contributors Network.

For companies interested in AI, digital transformation, and how these technologies impact the enterprise, head over to https://www.cio.com/blog/digital-vertices/

Arago & ContentSquare Talk on EU Expansion to NYC

What's it like to expand your business from Europe and hire on the ground in NYC?  Jonathan Cherki (CEO ContentSquare) and Chris Boos (CEO of MaintainPR client Arago) are two artificial intelligence experts from France and Germany respectively.

They recently sat down to record a podcast for Anthony Noto at NY Biz Journal to discuss just that.

Give it a listen here: 

European AI experts recall their experiences of launching companies in N.Y.C. -- NY BIz Journal

Highly Cited -- Arago Empowering through AI

MaintainPR client Arago has recently started powering AI automation for NITT; UBS; Virtusa Polaris and many more.

Here are some clippings from their busy Q1. Stay tuned for some big West Coast news coming up in Q2!!

"AI Pioneer Wants to Build the Renaissance Machine of the Future" -- Bloomberg

"The Smartest Machines Are Playing Games" -- Bloomberg

"Benchmarking CrunchBase's Top 25 Artificial Intelligence Startups" -- Forbes

"NIIT partners with Arago to integrate AI with automation" -- ChannelWorldd

"IT solutions firm NIIT Technologies said it will be integrating Arago's AI technology" -- Business Standard

Arago Drops AI Bomb on TechCrunch Disrupt London

MaintainPR client Arago (www.arago.co) has been in the AI game since the 90s. They are a leading artificial intelligence company that helps businesses automate their IT processes through intelligent automation.

Today at TechCrunch Disrupt London, Arago dropped a bombshell: their proprietary AI platform HIRO, which uses reasoning and a knowledge-based problem-solving engine optimized by machine learning to deliver cutting-edge enterprise IT automation solutions to clients worldwide, is already beating human players at FreeCiv.

It's a huge accomplishment for a smaller company (Google's DeepMind, with much more resource, only just start accessing APIs to play Starcraft II) and some of the world's biggest AI players, like Facebook, said it couldn't be done at all!

For more details, check out the press release and coverage from TechCrunch's Darrel Etherington as well as IDG Paris bureau chief Peter Sayer. Both are Civ players themselves that never got close to even beating the game's built in AI!

Arago’s AI can now beat some human players at complex civ strategy games -- TechCrunch

Arago teaches an AI to play games, the better to manage IT systems -- PC World

Watch Arago’s HIRO Beat Out Human Gamers in Freeciv -- Futurism