Memphis Meats’ Lab-Grown Meat Raises $17M With Help From Bill Gates And Richard Branson

In another recent leap for lab grown meat, clean meat company Memphis Meats announced that it completed a $17 million Series A fundraising round that was led by Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ), a leading venture capital firm that has also invested in SpaceX, Twitter and Tesla. The round included a number of notable investors including Richard Branson, Bill Gates and Suzy and Jack Welch. The round was also supported by food industry leaders including farm-to-table founding father Kimbal Musk and agriculture company Cargill Inc., the largest privately held corporation in the United States whose last declared revenues ($136.7 billion) would rank it number 15 on the Fortune 500.

‘Airbnb for boats’ startup Boatsetter buys competitor Boatbound

You don’t have to be rich or T-Pain to be “on a boat.” You can rent one plus a captain for the day from Boatsetter. And now it’s got boats in more than 300 locations around the U.S. since it just acquired rival maritime marketplace Boatbound.

Boatsetter will be taking select talent from Boatbound plus logistics tech and its inventory of vessels for rental. A source familiar with the transaction said the acquisition was paid for with Boatsetter stock valued in the low-millions range.

Startup Restb.ai captures 1.2 million for international expansion

Barcelona, ​​May 15 (EFE) .- The Barcelona startup Restb.ai, specialized in artificial vision that monitors and describes images on the Internet with an accuracy of 99%, has raised 1.2 million euros of funding for the international expansion of its technology.

Restb.ai has completed its first round of investment of 1.2 million, with the participation of US investment fund Court Westcott LLC, the Madrid Capitana Venture Partners fund with Lanta Capital, Athos Capital and Tandem Capital all of them from Barcelona.

Cisco acquires conversational AI startup MindMeld for $125 million

This morning Cisco announced that it is buying MindMeld for $125 million. Founded in 2011, MindMeld helps businesses to build conversational interfaces with cloud-based services.

MindMeld, originally called Expect Labs, was launched on the stage of TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2012. At that time the startup wanted to build an iPad app that could listen in on your conversations and provide relevant contextual information. Since then the company has expanded its offerings to include a suite of APIs for parsing, reasoning about and generating language.