Author: azeeadmin

D-Wave, the well-funded quantum computing company, today announced its next-gen quantum computing platform with 5,000 qubits, up from 2,000 in the company’s current system. The new platform will come to market in mid-2020.

The company’s new so-called Pegasus topology connects every qubit to 15 other qubits, up from six in its current topology. With this, developers can use the machine to solve larger problems with fewer physical qubits — or larger problems in general.

It’s worth noting that D-Wave’s qubits are different from those of the company’s competitors like Rigetti, IBM and Google, with shorter coherence times and a system that mostly focuses on solving optimization problems. To do that, D-Wave produces lots of qubits, but in a relatively high-noise environment. That means that you can’t compare D-Wave’s qubit count to that of its competitors (with D-Wave claiming the superiority of its machine for certain problems), which are building universal quantum computers.

The company also says that it has brought down the noise in its new system, making it its lowest-noise system yet. That’s to be expected in an updated system, of course, but with lower noise comes longer coherence times, which allows for running more complex applications, too.

It’s worth noting that while there was plenty of controversy around D-Wave’s earliest efforts and that it took a while to prove that the company’s hardware actually exploited any quantum effects, this isn’t really in questions anymore.

In 2020, D-Wave will make the new platform available through its Leap cloud-computing platform as it makes updates to its existing systems. Before that, though, developers can start writing applications for it using the company’s simulation and other developer tools.

“With the next-generation platform, we are making investments in things like connectivity and hybrid software and tools to allow customers to solve even more complex problems at greater scale, bringing new emerging quantum applications to life,” said Alan Baratz, D-Wave’s chief product officer, in today’s announcement. “Every decision we’ve made and every decision we’ll make will reflect an ongoing commitment to helping developers learn quantum systems and helping customers build the first commercial quantum killer applications.”

Following my report from yesterday, Apple has removed many of the apps I pointed out. When you try to find them on the App Store, they are no longer available.

App Store Review Guidelines are very clear when it comes to app duplicates. According to rule 4.3, you can’t release the same app multiple times on the App Store has it is considered as spamming.

But that rule has been poorly enforced and some companies have taken advantage of that. In my original report, I focused on one category in particular — VoIP apps that let you get a second phone number and send and receive calls and texts from that new number.

Developers release multiple versions of the same app so that they can use different names, different keywords and different categories. This way, they can cover a wide range of keywords when you’re searching for an app in the App Store.

So let’s look at the developers I called out yesterday. It’s still unclear if some of these apps will reappear after some changes.

TextMe, Inc.

• TextMe Up Second Phone Number — REMOVED
• Free Tone – Calling & Texting — REMOVED
• Text Me – Phone Calls + Text — REMOVED

BinaryPattern and Flexible Numbers LLC

• Texting/Calling Phone Burner — STILL AVAILABLE
• Smiley Private Texting SMS — STILL AVAILABLE
• Texting Shield – Phone Number — REMOVED
• Burner Phone Numbers SMS/Calls — REMOVED
• Business Line Phone Number — REMOVED

Appverse Inc.

• Phoner 2nd Phone Number Text — REMOVED
• Text Burner – Texting Anonymous — REMOVED
• Second Line – 2nd Phone Number — REMOVED

Dingtone Inc.

• Dingtone – WiFi Calling & Text — REMOVED
• Telos Second Phone Number — REMOVED

This case illustrates once again that Apple holds the keys to the App Store kingdom. The company acts as a judge and can make or break some companies.

Some of those companies have released clones of their apps and benefited from that strategy for many years. The main issue here is that App Store rules aren’t enforced consistently.

Plenty of clones in other categories

The clone plague is far from over. Many categories also use this App Store optimization strategy.

JPEG Labs has released four different apps that let you print photos in Walgreens or CVS stores around you. They all do the same thing but have different names and keywords. (They also tell you to leave a review right after opening the app.)

Photo Prints: 1 Hour Photos

Print Photos: 1 Hour Prints

Printmatic 1 Hour Photo Print

Same Day Canvas Photo Prints

When you can’t beat them, acquire them

Another good example is MailPix, Inc. You can find multiple copies of the same app. The company is also slowly expanding its App Store footprint by acquiring competitors and changing those apps into duplicated versions of the main app.

MailPix acquired Photobucket’s printing app to turn it into a clone.

Trust is a fundamental building block of any healthy relationship, whether that’s between individuals or companies and customers. If you can’t trust the company you are doing business with to do the right thing by you, it’s hard to continue the relationship. Too often, we have seen this trust broken when it comes to data sharing.

Last week, a Wall Street Journal article revealed a practice of apps sharing highly personal data with Facebook without user knowledge, whether the user had a Facebook account or not. In a follow up article, the WSJ listed all 11 apps in its study (five of which stopped sharing data after being contacted by the publication). These included an ovulation and a heart monitoring apps.

Whatever the reason, if your users aren’t aware that you are sharing their data  in this fashion, and that would appear to be the case, then it’s a gross violation of trust between user and brand. Marc Benioff, co-CEO and co-founder at Salesforce has often stated, trust is one of the primary components of a healthy brand-customer relationship. If you mess that up, it’s going to be very tough going for you as a business.

In an interview in September with Bloomberg’s Emily Chang, Benioff had this to say about trust. “Every CEO needs to ask themselves what is the most important thing to you. What is the most important thing to your company? What is your highest value? I know our highest value at Salesforce is trust. Nothing is more important than the trust that we have that we have with our customers or employees or partners or our top executives,” Benioff explained.

He went onto say when companies misuse customer’s data, they are breaking that trust and that could involve losing key personnel or customers. “When you see top executives walking out. When you see customers questioning your privacy practices or how you’re using or misusing their data or how you’re misusing partnerships, you need to listen. You need to wake up. You need to [ask] what is going on. It’s very serious,” Benioff said

If Benioff is right, and trust is the basis of all business relationships, then you’re playing with fire when you abuse the trust by sharing data with third parties without your customer’s knowledge, and sooner or later that’s going to come back and bite you as a brand.

Let’s face it, people stop using apps for a variety of reasons that have nothing to do with something as fundamental as trust. It could just be buggy or slow, but when the app is sending data to another company without user knowledge, it’s easy enough to just remove it from the phone and find another one that doesn’t do that (or at least you hope it doesn’t).

For brands, perception is everything. If people begin to think you are not looking out for their best interests, or are putting profit over common sense protections, it becomes difficult to turn around those negative feelings, once they begin to harden.

If the brand continues to abuse its users time and again, it will eventually have an impact on revenue and begin to hurt your relationship with your existing customer base, and your ability to attract new customers to your products and services.

It seems like a risk that would be too big to take, yet we see brands take these risks time and again. If you don’t want to go that route, it’s pretty easy to prevent. Do right by your customers and they’ll continue to believe in you — or don’t, and watch what happens.

Volvo’s standalone electric performance brand Polestar introduced Wednesday its first all-electric vehicle — a five-door fastback that is gunning for the Tesla Model 3.

In the past few years, every time an electric vehicle — concept, prototype, or production version — has been unveiled, the term “Tesla killer” has been tossed about regardless of whether that car will ever even come to market.

In the case of Polestar 2, it’s unclear if it will be the “Tesla killer.” It’s possible that an entirely new group of customers will be attracted to the vehicle. What is clear: the Polestar 2 was designed to compete with the Tesla Model 3 in the U.S., Europe and China. 

You can watch the reveal on Polestar’s YouTube channel.

The specs

The Polestar 2 meant to be a performance electric vehicle. It’s equipped with two electric motors and a 78 kilowatt-hour battery pack that has an estimated EPA range of about 275 miles.

The Polestar 2’s all-wheel drive electric powertrain produces 300 kW ( an equivalent of 408 horsepower) and 487 lb-ft of torque. This is above the rear-wheel (and currently cheapest) version of the Model 3. It’s just a skoosh under the dual-motor performance version of the Model 3, which has an output of 450 horsepower and 471 lb-ft of torque.

The Polestar 2 accelerates from 0 to 100km (about 62 mph) in less than 5 seconds — again a stat that puts it right above the mid-range Model 3 and below the performance version.

Android inside

In 2017, Volvo announced plans to incorporate a version of its Android operating system into its car infotainment systems. A year later, the company said it would embed voice-controlled Google Assistant, Google Play Store, Google Maps, and other Google services into its next-generation Sensus infotainment system.

Polestar has followed Volvo. The Polestar 2’s infotainment system will be powered by Android OS and as a result, bring embedded Google services such as Google Assistant, Google Maps, and the Google Play Store into the car.

This shouldn’t be confused with Android Auto, which is a secondary interface that lays on top of an operating system. Android OS is modeled after its open-source mobile operating system that runs on Linux. But instead of running smartphones and tablets, Google modified it so it could be used in cars.

The Polestar 2 will also have so-called “Phone-As-Key technology,” which basically means customers will have the ability to unlock their car remotely using their smartphones. This capability opens the door — literally and figuratively — for owners to rent their vehicle out via car sharing or use a delivery service to drop off items in the vehicle.

The feature also allows Polestar 2 to sense the driver upon approach. 

Market plans

The base price of Polestar 2 is 39,900 euros ($45,389), the company says. However, for the first year of production the pricier “launch edition” will only be available at 59,900, or about $68,000. (The prices are listed before any federal or state incentives might be applied).

Production of the Polestar 2 will begin in early 2020 at its Chengdu, China factory. The company is initially targeting sales in China, the U.S., Canada and a handful of European countries that include Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and the UK.

Polestar, like its potential rival Tesla, is also ditching the dealership. Polestar will only sell its vehicles online and will offer customers subscriptions to the vehicle. Subscription pricing will be revealed at a later date, Polestar said.

The automaker is also opening “Polestar Spaces,” a showroom where customers can interact with the product and schedule test drives. These spaces will be standalone facilities and not within existing Volvo retailer showrooms.

Polestar was once a high-performance brand under Volvo Cars. In 2017, the company was recast as an electric performance brand aimed at producing exciting and fun-to-drive electric vehicles — a niche that Tesla was the first to fill and has dominated ever since. Polestar is a jointly owned by Volvo Car Group and Zhejiang Geely Holding of China. Volvo was acquired by Geely in 2010.

The company’s first vehicle, the Polestar 1, was unveiled in September.  The Polestar 1 is not a pure electric vehicle; it’s a plug-in hybrid with two electrical motors powered by three 34 kilowatt-hour battery packs and a turbo and supercharged gas inline 4 up front.

Polestar said Wednesday that its next vehicle, the Polestar 3, will be an all-electric “performance SUV.” The company didn’t provide any additional details about the Polestar 3.

FedEx is a courier delivery and logistics company; and in 2019, that means it must also have an autonomous delivery bot.

The delivery services company, known for its overnight shipping, unveiled Wednesday an autonomous delivery device called SameDayBot. The bot, which will be tested this summer in select markets including FedEx’s hometown Memphis, is being developed in collaboration with DEKA Development & Research Corp. and its founder Dean Kamen, who invented the Segway and iBot wheelchair.

FedEx is working with AutoZone, Lowe’s, Pizza Hut, Target, Walgreens and Walmart to figure out how this whole autonomous bot business might actually function. The idea, FedEx says, is to provide a way for retailers to accept orders from nearby customers and deliver them by bot directly to customers’ homes or businesses the same day.

The initial test will involve deliveries between selected FedEx Office locations, the company said. Ultimately, theFedEx bot will complement the FedEx SameDay City service, which operates in 32 markets and 1,900 cities.

The underlying roots of the SameDay Bot is the iBot, one of Kamen’s inventions. DEKA built upon the power base of the iBot, an FDA-approved mobility device for the disabled population, to develop FedEx’s product. And Kamen clearly sees this partnership with FedEx as another way to help push the iBot forward.

“The bot has unique capabilities that make it unlike other autonomous vehicles,” Kamen said. “We built upon the power base of the iBot, an advanced, FDA-approved, mobility device for the disabled population with more than 10 million hours of reliable, real-world operation. By leveraging this base in an additional application, we hope that the iBot will become even more accessible to those who need it for their own mobility.”

The FedEx bot is equipped with sensing technology such as LiDAR and multiple cameras, which when combined with machine learning algorithms should allow the device to detect and avoid obstacles, plot a safe path, all while following the rules of the road (or sidewalk).

FedEx says the proprietary technology is the secret sauce that makes the bot highly capable and allows it to navigate unpaved surfaces, curbs, and even steps for an extraordinary door-to-door delivery experience. That’s an important feature for businesses and their customers, who might not want or be physically able to fetch a package at the bottom of stairs.

FedEx’s move follows the march of other like-minded logistics and delivery companies such as PostMates and Amazon .

PostMates developed Serve, a new cooler-meet-autonomous-stroller. In January, Amazon took the wraps off its six-wheeled robot Scout. Then there are all the private companies developing autonomous delivery bots, including Nuro, Robby and Starship. 

CES 2019 was a dud. It happens. Some years are more exciting than other. The world of technology ebbs and flows. Time is a flat circle. All that glitters is gold. Only shooting stars break the mold.

MWC, on the other hand — I’ve actually been pretty excited about this show for while now. The mobile industry is a crossroads. Smartphone sales have begun to stagnate and recede for the first time since analysts began tracking the things. Heck, this was the year the conference name officially changed from Mobile World Congress to MWC Barcelona.

That sort of sly rebranding takes some of the heavy lifting off the “mobile” bit for what has come to be regarded as the world’s premier smartphone launching pad. Don’t be too surprised to see the show attempt a shift into the broader world of consumer electronics, a la CES or IFA.

Meantime, smartphones are very much still the thing. The devices are still a ubiquitous part of our lives and will continue to be so for the foreseeable future. There are a number of reasons for the slowdown in sales, but the primary factors are slowed upgrade cycles and phones have gotten better and new features have become less compelling, coupled with rough economic trends in places like China, which were anticipated to be the primary driver for the category going forward.

The upshot of all of this is a newfound sense of experimentation. Keeping shareholders happy requires constant upward growth, and kickstarting sales will take some compelling reasons to upgrade. This year was the first time, perhaps since the original iPhone, that we’ve seen a radical shift in form factors, with Samsung, Huawei, TCL and Oppo all announcing foldable phones in the last couple of weeks.

Making sure they’re ready for primetime is another question altogether, but I’m definitely on-board for the manner of differentiation they bring. While it’s true that a number of major players all got on the foldable train at roughly the same time, we’ve seen some unique approaches as the industry scrambles to figure out the best way to utilize flexible technology.

The fact is that none of these are going to be big sellers out of the gate — the average price point, which is currently hovering around $2,000 will see to that. Huawei, for one, seems to have tempered its expectations around the category. Mobile chief Richard Yu quite nearly apologized for the price of the Mate X on stage the other day.

But the inability to pay double the price of a flagship smartphone shouldn’t be mistaken for a lack of interest, nor should it be used as justification for pulling back on experimentation. In a recent conversation, the CEO of Light discussed how the maturation of the smartphone category could afford smartphone makers the opportunity to better target different user needs.

He was speaking specifically about different camera arrays on the backs of phones, but I don’t see why that can’t apply to the space in broader terms. Plenty of smartphone makers have gotten burned trying to compete with similar products on the same field as Apple or Samsung.

For years, smartphones have constituted one of the very few consistent trends in an others fragmented media landscape. It’s not too hard to imagine smartphones undergoing a similar transformation, in which smartphones are less uniform, but better suited to users’ individual needs.

Of course, it seems just as — if not more likely — that handset makers will ultimately pull the plug on any devices that fail to catch the world on fire. Just look at the recent rumors that Razer has abandoned plans for a third gaming phone.

Here’s hoping, however, that this year’s MWC marks the first step for a mobile space long overdue for a radical shakeup.

Fintech startup N26 plans to launch its bank service in Brazil in 2019. The company announced the news on stage at MWC in Barcelona.

N26 has already announced that its next market would be the U.S. at some point during the first half of 2019. Brazil should launch after that.

Right now, N26 is available in 24 European countries, including all of the Eurozone, the U.K., Denmark, Norway, Poland, and Sweden, Liechtenstein and Iceland.

The company reached 2 million customers back in November 2018. N26 says that it now has 2.5 million customers. It has processed €20 billion in transaction volume since its creation in 2013, and customers currently hold over €1 billion in N26 accounts.

Eduardo Prota will be the General Manager for Brazil. He’s worked for Santander, Cielo and various startups. N26 will compete with another challenger bank in Brazil, Nubank. The startup already has 5 million customers and has raised hundreds of millions of dollars.

N26 also recently raised $300 million at a $2.7 billion valuation. It’s clear that the company doesn’t want to stop at Europe. Let’s see if N26 can reproduce the same success on another continent.

As SVP of Walmart’s global ecommerce supply chain for five years until 2018, I had a front row seat to how brick-and-mortar retailers were responding to Amazon’s dominance in e-commerce. Most of us were alarmed. And who could blame us? Today, Amazon has nearly50% of all e-commerce trade.

The way I see it, if you are a brick-and-mortar retailer, you either embrace a digital strategy to become omnichannel or do nothing and become irrelevant.  To fully appreciate the gravity of the situation, let’s step back to understand how we got here. And importantly, start with what I believe is the single, biggest challenge for retailers today.

Holy Grail: Become Truly Omnichannel

Omnichannel retailing has become the goal that every retailer is aiming for — but few know how to achieve. In a nutshell, omnichannel simply means providing customers a seamless, continuous experience wherever customers would like to shop – across any device or store location – with a unified brand experience.

For example, I can buy a pair of shoes from Nordstrom using my smartphone and choose to pick up my purchase at a store or have it delivered to my home. If I want to return the shoes for any reason, I can do so by mail or return them at a store. My interaction with Nordstrom consistently flows from one channel to another.

But from a brick-and-mortar retailer’s perspective, that’s easier said than done.

A Lot More Moving Parts

They say the “devil’s in the details” and I would add the “details are in the supply chain.” And today’s supply chain is more complex than ever – especially if you’re a traditional, brick-and-mortar retailer striving to transform into an omnichannel. To start, you have to get your head around doing things very differently. You will be:

• Distributing products to millions of homes instead of hundreds of stores
• Managing millions of SKUs (stock keeping units) instead of thousands
• Shipping to homes in parcels (including last-mile delivery) instead of truckloads to stores
• Running fulfillment centers (FCs) in addition to distribution centers (DCs). FCs ship goods directly to customers. DCs ship goods to stores.

Want to Be an Omnichannel?

Be Ready to Add “Fulfillment Centers” to Your Existing Mix of “Distribution Centers”. The level of complexity will increase by orders of magnitude.

Three Key Challenges to Omnichannel Excellence

These are the top-three most intransigent challenges you will face in your omnichannel quest:

• Organizational and Management Constraints
• People can be resistant to change. Many find it hard to think in new paradigms.
• Different business units have different processes, KPIs (key performance indicators) and incentives.

Sharing of assets across all channels can be difficult. For example, how should you allocate warehouse space and balance the availability of products (i.e. inventory) between online and in-store sales?

Process and Systems Challenges

• First you need to plan: you must aggregate demand forecasting and planning for both physical and online sales by channel.
• Then figure out what you have: Determine product assortment across all channels: DCs, FCs, your own stores and even third-party locations like a marketplace vendor.
• Lastly, you need to know where to ship your products from. You must instantaneously track what was sold against a global inventory spread across a myriad of locations.

Continuous Innovation

A brick-and-mortar retailer will need to continually learn new processes and technologies that impact your supply chain. For example:

• Learn new processes when integrating FCs into your supply chain network. This includes new ways to receive, sort, store, pick, pack, ship, house products in lockers or stores for drive-through and pick-ups. These processes are completely different from what is used at traditional DCs or stores.
• Keep abreast of packaging technology, both the method of packing (optimizing how much you can fit into a package) and the materials (consider what’s best for long distance, the environment, costs, and the protection of the product, especially if it involves home delivery of groceries with thermal foam or totes.)
• Meet the demands of home grocery shopping and “last mile” deliveries. In addition to delivering goods in full truckloads from DCs to stores, you must learn how to operate so-called “milk runs” from stores to customer homes. When delivering groceries to a home, you must adhere to certain time slots and sometimes make “live deliveries” to ensure perishable goods are received promptly and safely. This entails a constantly refreshed and technologically modern TMS (Transportation Management System).

 Amazon Had a Wide, Open Field

Going back to the headline of this article, how did Amazon become the e-commerce behemoth that it is today with seemingly little resistance from traditional retailers? Was the brick-and-mortar executives asleep at the wheel? To answer that question, some historical framing could help: 

The Four Waves of Ecommerce

So What’s a Retailer to Do?

I think we’re at the point of no return. The omnichannel train has left the station.  What would I do if I ran a retail business today? First, I would accept the fact that customers now love to shop both online and offline, and they expect 2-day shipping for certain products and near flawless execution. The bar has been set high by Amazon. Then I would create a game plan that leverages my existing physical assets like warehouses, distribution centers, and stores to offer new services like ship-from-store or pickup-at-store. I would also build new fulfillment centers specifically to fulfill online orders and ship to customers’ homes.

Although Amazon dominates e-commerce, there are multitudes of department stores and retail brands with successful digital platforms. I was on the Walmart team from 2013 to 2018 when Walmart invested heavily in their omnichannel strategy.

On February 19, 2019, Walmart announced their FY 2019 Q4 results which showed the company grew e-commerce sales by 43 percent year-over-year in its last quarter, blowing past estimates for the holiday season.

Of course, many factors go into an effective omnichannel strategy. The biggest factor, in my mind, is simply to gather the corporate will and get started.

This is the moment we’ve been waiting for. After years of prototypes, the age of foldables has finally arrived. They’re here. I’ve seen them, and even, briefly, touched one.

And that’s about as far as it goes, to be honest. A week after Samsung kicked off its S10 event with an in-depth look at the Galaxy Fold, the device made its IRL debut at MWC, this week. We got to the show an hour early on the first day, only to find four devices trapped behind glass cases.

The weren’t doing much of anything at all. Two were splayed to show the backs of the devices and two showed off the screens. We were able to get within a few inches of the things, before security swooped in and put up the ropes. The Fold has a release date that’s just under two months away, and yet here were are, stuck admiring the thing from afar.

Huawei was a bit better. Another morning session yesterday found us backstage at the company’s booth, getting up close and personal with the Mate X. But things got a little weird. I’m used to being baby sat with pricey new devices, but Huawei went out of its way to several limit interactivity with the product, as noted in the story.

TCL’s product got a similar behind-glass treatment as the Fold. Though there’s one key difference: the company gave a 2020 timeframe for its more affordable (more affordable than $2,600, that is) take on the category. That, hopefully, is enough time to work out all of the kinks ahead of product launch.

That neither Huawei nor Samsung feel confident enough to let us go a bit more in-depth with their soon to be released devices isn’t the kind of thing that really instills one with confidence in an emerging space. Royole, to its credit, has let the press go fully hands on with products back at CES, though, by nearly all accounts, the product feels more like a developer device than anything.

And that, really, is the fear. Samsung’s charging an arm and a leg for the device, at $1,980. Huawei’s tossed in another limb, bringing the total up to $2,600. That’s not beta tester levels. That’s double the cost of already exorbitant flagship smartphone pricing for products that appear to still have a lot of bugs to work out.

It’s true that there’s a lot that needs to be redesigned after generations of coalescing around the same basic form factor, both from a hardware and software perspective. But it’s one thing to announce a concept and another entirely to bring it to market. If these initial devices ultimately prove buggy or are otherwise a let down from a user perspective, it’s going to a fairly inauspicious start for a long promised form factor.

Horizon Robotics, a three-year-old Chinese startup backed by Intel Capital, just raised a mega-round of fundings from domestic and overseas backers as it competes for global supremacy in developing AI solutions and chips aimed at autonomous vehicles, smart retail stores, surveillance equipment and other devices for everyday scenarios.

The Beijing-based company announced Wednesday in a statement that it’s hauled in $600 million in a Series B funding round led by SK China, the China subsidiary of South Korean conglomerate SK Group; SK Hynix, SK’s semiconductor unit; and a number of undisclosed Chinese automakers along with their funds.

The fresh capital drove Horizon’s valuation to at least $3 billion, the company claims. The Financial Times previously reported that the chipmaker was raising up to $1 billion in a funding round that could value it at as much as $4 billion. Such a price tag could perhaps be justified by the vast amount of resources China has poured into the red-hot sector as part of a national push to shed dependency on imported chips and work towards what analysts call “semiconductor sovereignty.”

Horizon did not specify how the proceeds will be used. The company could not be immediately reached for comments.

In 2015, Yu Kai left Baidu as the Chinese search engine giant’s deep learning executive and founded Horizon to make the “brains” for a broad spectrum of connected devices. In doing so Yu essentially set himself up for a race against industry veterans like Intel and Nvidia. To date, the startup has managed to make a dent by securing government contracts, which provide a stable source of income for China’s AI upstarts including SenseTime, and several big-name clients like SK’s telecommunication unit, which is already leveraging Horizon’s algorithms to develop smart retail solutions. Like many of its peers who are at the forefront of the AI race, Horizon has set up an office in Silicon Valley and hiring local talents for its lab.

Other investors who joined the round included several of Horizon’s returning investors such as Hillhouse Capital and Morningside Venture Capital . There were also some heavyweight new backers, such as a fund run by conglomerate China Oceanwide Holdings as well as the CSOBOR Fund, a private equity entity set up by China’s state-owned CITIC to back projects pertaining to China’s ambitious “One Belt, One Road” modern Silk Road initiative.