Author: yasmeeta
San Francisco startup MaintainX raises $50 million for industrial AI.
MaintainX, a startup based in San Francisco that specializes in industrial maintenance software, discreetly revealed on Wednesday that it has successfully secured $50 million in a Series C funding round. The funding was led by Bain Capital Ventures (BCV), a prominent investor in growth-stage enterprises, and it placed a valuation of $1 billion on the company. This achievement marks MaintainX as the latest addition to the prestigious unicorn club for the current year. The infusion of capital will be instrumental in fueling MaintainX’s expansion efforts in research and development, bolstering its artificial intelligence capabilities, and broadening its customer base.
Established in 2018, MaintainX offers a mobile platform that empowers frontline workers to engage with their supervisors, monitor tasks, access manuals and checklists, and promptly report issues. Additionally, the platform aggregates and assesses data from diverse sources, including sensors, equipment usage, and parts inventory, to provide valuable insights and recommendations aimed at enhancing operational efficiency and reducing downtime.
Currently, MaintainX’s software is embraced by over 6,500 clients across a wide spectrum of industries encompassing manufacturing, energy, hospitality, and food and beverage. Notable customers include Duracell, Marriott, Volvo, AB InBev, McDonald’s, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
In an exclusive conversation with VentureBeat, Chris Turlica, the CEO and co-founder of MaintainX, articulated the company’s vision of forging a “zero-downtime future” for industrial operations. This ambitious goal hinges on leveraging artificial intelligence and real-time data sets to preemptively identify and mitigate potential breakdowns and operational challenges.
Turlica also underscored the company’s commitment to catering to the preferences of a new generation of frontline professionals and procurement managers who prioritize user-friendly and intuitive software solutions. He noted that the industrial sector is undergoing a transformation where the decision-makers are no longer traditional IT professionals but instead, frontline workers, plant managers, and maintenance supervisors who seek software that is easy to deploy, integrate, and use.
Merritt Hummer, a partner at Bain Capital Ventures who spearheaded the investment and joined MaintainX’s board of directors, expressed admiration for the company’s growth, product quality, and high customer satisfaction. She characterized MaintainX as one of the standout emerging growth-stage firms, citing the exceptional founding team, expansive market potential, and impressive track record as driving factors behind her enthusiasm.
Hummer also highlighted the potential synergy between Bain Capital Ventures, with its portfolio of more than 400 companies, and MaintainX. She emphasized the opportunity to introduce MaintainX’s software to their existing industrial and manufacturing companies, potentially facilitating further growth.
The industrial maintenance sector, estimated at over $49 billion globally by Allied Market Research, is witnessing a rising demand for software solutions that optimize workflows, reduce costs, and ensure compliance. The disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the adoption of digital technologies in the sector, emphasizing the importance of such solutions.
MaintainX, competing with players like UpKeep, Fiix, and eMaint, has experienced a remarkable revenue growth, surging 13-fold since its previous funding round in 2021, when it secured $39 million in a Series B round led by Bessemer Venture Partners. This substantial funding infusion underscores investor confidence in MaintainX’s mission and its ability to leverage artificial intelligence for industrial maintenance transformation. The participation of prominent business figures such as former GE CEO Jeff Immelt further underscores MaintainX’s traction.
In a landscape shaped by artificial intelligence and big data, MaintainX’s focus on these areas positions the company favorably in the marketplace. With its mission to reduce operational downtime through AI, MaintainX is poised to disrupt the industrial maintenance sector in a significant manner.
Reflecting on a year of significant transformation in the realm of AI.
A year has passed since OpenAI quietly introduced ChatGPT as a “research preview,” a chatbot powered by a sophisticated large language model (LLM). These LLMs are a specific application of transformer neural networks, a technology initially presented in a 2017 Google paper.
ChatGPT offered a user-friendly interface to the underlying LLM, GPT-3.5, and became the fastest-growing consumer technology in history, attracting over a million users within just five days of its launch. Today, there are hundreds of millions of ChatGPT users, and various other similar bots built on different LLMs from multiple companies have emerged. One of the latest additions is Amazon Q, a chatbot tailored for business purposes.
These technological advancements have the potential to reshape creative and knowledge work profoundly. For instance, a recent MIT study focused on tasks such as crafting cover letters, composing sensitive emails, and conducting cost-benefit analyses. The study demonstrated that using ChatGPT led to a 40% reduction in the time required to complete these tasks and an 18% improvement in output quality, as evaluated by independent assessors.
Comparisons to foundational discoveries like electricity and fire are apt because AI, like these innovations, has the power to revolutionize nearly every facet of our lives. It can alter how we work, communicate, and address complex challenges, much like electricity transformed industries, and fire changed early human societies.
Racing toward the future, consulting firm McKinsey has estimated that generative AI will contribute over $4 trillion annually to the global economy. Consequently, tech giants like Microsoft and Google are aggressively pursuing opportunities in this market.
Debates about the impact and safety of AI technology have been ongoing since the advent of ChatGPT. These debates, spanning from the U.S. Congress to the historic Bletchley Park (formerly a hub for British code-breaking during World War II), essentially fall into two perspectives: AI “accelerationists” and “doomers.”
Accelerationists advocate for rapid AI development, highlighting its immense potential benefits, while “doomers” advocate for a cautious approach that emphasizes the potential risks associated with unchecked AI development. These debates have prompted significant actions in AI regulation. While the EU AI Act has been in development for several years, the U.S. has taken a proactive stance with a comprehensive Executive Order on “Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence,” aiming for a balanced approach between unbridled development and rigorous oversight.
Countries worldwide are actively pursuing AI strategies in response to the LLM revolution. Russian President Vladimir Putin has recently announced plans for a new Russian AI development strategy to counter Western dominance in the field, albeit belatedly, as the U.S., China, the U.K., and others have already made substantial progress. Interestingly, Putin had famously stated in 2017 that the nation leading in AI “will be the ruler of the world.”
Reflecting on this whirlwind year in AI, one might have thought it reached its peak when OpenAI’s board of directors fired Sam Altman, the CEO. However, Altman returned within a week following an investor and employee revolt, and the board underwent changes.
Now, a new enigma surrounds OpenAI in the form of Project Q* (pronounced “Q-star”). Researchers assigned the name “Q” to represent the “Quartermaster,” a top-secret figure known for creating gadgets for the fictional James Bond character.
According to Reuters, the OpenAI board received a letter from researchers just days before Altman’s dismissal, warning that Q* could pose a threat to humanity. Speculation abounds regarding what Q* might entail, ranging from a groundbreaking neuro-symbolic architecture (a significant development) to a more modest yet impressive fusion of LLMs and existing techniques to outperform current state-of-the-art models.
An effective neuro-symbolic architecture of this scale does not currently exist but could enable AI to learn from minimal data while offering clearer explanations for its behavior and reasoning. Several organizations, including IBM, view this architecture as a pathway to achieving Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), the capacity for AI to process information at or beyond human capabilities, at machine speed.
Although Q* may not represent such a breakthrough, if it enters the market, it would mark another step toward AGI. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang has even suggested that AGI could be attainable within five years. Microsoft President Brad Smith, on the other hand, has a more conservative view, stating that achieving AGI, where computers surpass human capabilities, will likely take many years, if not decades.
The year ahead promises a wide range of emotions and developments. Breakthroughs like ChatGPT and projects like Q* have sparked optimism, concerns, regulatory discussions, competition, and speculative thoughts. The rapid advancements in AI over the past year are not just technological milestones but also a reflection of our unwavering pursuit of knowledge and mastery over our creations.
As we look ahead, the coming year is shaping up to be as exciting and unsettling as the last, depending on how effectively we channel our energy and guidance in this transformative field.
Meta AI introduces ‘Seamless’ translator enabling instant cross-language communication.
Meta AI researchers unveiled their latest achievement on Thursday, introducing a groundbreaking suite of artificial intelligence models known as “Seamless Communication.” These models are designed to facilitate more natural and authentic cross-language communication, effectively bringing the concept of a Universal Speech Translator into reality. This week, the research team made these models available to the public, alongside comprehensive research papers and associated data.
The flagship model, aptly named “Seamless,” amalgamates the capabilities of three other models: SeamlessExpressive, SeamlessStreaming, and SeamlessM4T v2, into a unified system. As outlined in the research paper, Seamless marks a significant milestone as “the first publicly accessible system that enables expressive cross-lingual communication in real-time.”
Understanding How Seamless Operates as a Universal Real-time Translator The Seamless translator signifies a pioneering advancement in the realm of AI-assisted communication across borders. It harnesses the power of three sophisticated neural network models to facilitate real-time translation across over 100 spoken and written languages, all while preserving the speaker’s vocal style, emotions, and prosody.
SeamlessExpressive’s primary focus is on safeguarding the speaker’s vocal style and emotional subtleties during language translation. As articulated in the research paper, “Translations should capture the nuances of human expression. While existing translation tools excel at conveying the content of a conversation, they typically rely on monotonous, robotic text-to-speech systems for their output.”
SeamlessStreaming takes the lead in offering nearly instantaneous translations, with a mere two seconds of latency. According to the researchers, it stands as the “first massively multilingual model” to deliver such rapid translation speeds across almost 100 spoken and written languages.
The third model, SeamlessM4T v2, serves as the cornerstone for the other two models. It represents an upgraded iteration of the original SeamlessM4T model released the previous year. This novel architecture enhances the “consistency between text and speech output,” as highlighted in the research paper.
“In summary, Seamless offers us a crucial glimpse into the technical underpinnings essential for transforming the Universal Speech Translator from a mere science fiction concept into a tangible real-world technology,” noted the researchers.
The Potential to Revolutionize Global Communication
These models’ capabilities have the potential to usher in new voice-based communication experiences, ranging from real-time multilingual conversations using smart glasses to automatically dubbed videos and podcasts. The researchers also envision these models breaking down language barriers for immigrants and others grappling with communication challenges.
The research paper states, “By openly sharing our work, we aspire to empower researchers and developers to extend the impact of our contributions by crafting technologies aimed at bridging multilingual connections in an increasingly interconnected and interdependent world.”
Nonetheless, the researchers acknowledge the potential misuse of this technology for voice phishing scams, deep fakes, and other harmful purposes. To ensure safety and responsible usage of the models, they have implemented various measures, including audio watermarking and novel techniques to minimize problematic outputs.
Models Now Publicly Available on Hugging Face In alignment with Meta’s commitment to open research and collaboration, the Seamless Communication models have been made accessible to the public on platforms such as Hugging Face and Github. This collection encompasses the Seamless, SeamlessExpressive, SeamlessStreaming, and SeamlessM4T v2 models, accompanied by relevant metadata.
Meta’s objective in providing these state-of-the-art natural language processing models to the public is to foster collaboration among fellow researchers and developers, allowing them to build upon and expand this work in order to connect people across diverse languages and cultures. This release underscores Meta’s leadership in the domain of open source AI, offering a valuable new resource for the global research community.
“In conclusion,” the researchers affirm, “the multifaceted experiences that Seamless may enable have the potential to revolutionize the landscape of machine-assisted cross-lingual communication.”
Reportedly, Adobe has acquired the text-to-video AI platform known as Rephrase.
As the five-day power struggle at OpenAI reaches its conclusion with Sam Altman’s reinstatement, Adobe is gearing up to enhance its generative AI capabilities. According to a report from the Economic Times, the software giant has internally announced its acquisition of Rephrase, a California-based company specializing in text-to-video technology.
While the exact financial details of the deal remain undisclosed, this move is poised to strengthen Adobe’s suite of Creative Cloud products, which have steadily incorporated generative AI improvements over the past year. In particular, Rephrase will enable Adobe to empower its customers to effortlessly produce professional-quality videos from text inputs.
CEO Ashray Malhotra of Rephrase disclosed the acquisition through a LinkedIn post but refrained from explicitly naming Adobe, referring to the acquiring entity as a “leading tech giant.” When pressed for further details, he cited limitations on sharing information at this stage.
What Rephrase brings to the table: Established in 2019 by Ashray Malhotra, Nisheeth Lahoti, and Shivam Mangla, Rephrase offers enterprises access to Rephrase Studio, a platform enabling users to create polished videos featuring digital avatars in mere minutes. The process involves selecting a video template, choosing an avatar along with the desired voice, and adding the necessary content.
Upon initiating the rendering process within Rephrase, the platform automatically combines all elements, synchronizing the script with the chosen avatar. Users can enhance their content’s naturalness through various customization options, such as resizing avatars, altering backgrounds, adjusting pauses between words, or incorporating custom audio.
Over the past four years, Rephrase has amassed over 50,000 customers and secured nearly $14 million in funding from multiple investors, including Red Ventures and Lightspeed India. Initially known for enabling enterprises and influencers to create custom avatars for personalized business videos, the acquisition will now bring these capabilities, along with a significant portion of the Rephrase team, into Adobe’s fold, bolstering their generative AI video offerings.
Ashley Still, Senior Vice President and General Manager for Adobe Creative Cloud, wrote in the internal memo, “The Rephrase.ai team’s expertise in generative AI video and audio technology, and experience-building text-to-video generator tools, will extend our generative video capabilities—and enable us to deliver more value to our customers faster— all within our industry-leading creative applications.”
When VentureBeat reached out to Adobe for comment, a spokesperson declined to provide additional insights into the development or how Rephrase’s tools will complement Adobe’s product portfolio.
Adobe’s Strong Embrace of AI: In recent months, Adobe has been at the forefront of advancing generative AI with several product updates. It introduced Firefly, an AI engine for image generation, which was integrated across Creative Cloud products like Photoshop. This innovation allowed users to manipulate images by describing changes in plain text.
Furthermore, at its annual Max conference last month, Adobe showcased various experimental generative AI-powered video features, including upscaling videos, changing textures and objects through text prompts, and compositing subjects and scenes from separate videos. While the timeline for the incorporation of these features into future releases remains uncertain, Rephrase’s digital avatar-based capabilities appear to be a promising addition.
Ashray Malhotra expressed his excitement for the future of Generative AI, emphasizing that it’s still in its early stages. Adobe Creative Cloud, known for decades as the dominant platform for digital art and media, currently offers six main products for audio and video-related work: Premiere Pro, After Effects, Audition, Character Animator, Animate, and Media Encoder. These tools are used by both professionals and amateurs to create, edit, and share digital content, leaving a lasting impact on online communities and trends through countless memes, parodies, and viral art.
