AI Analytics Firm, Pyramid Analytics Secures $50 Million From BlackRock

Pyramid Analytics, an AI business analytics company, said on Monday it has raised $50 million in new financing from BlackRock, the world's biggest asset manager.

Nov 25, 2024

Why it’s important

Companies around the world are racing to integrate artificial intelligence (AI) into their businesses. Startups offering AI services are a bright spot in an otherwise subdued private funding market.

The global market for big data and business analytics is projected to reach $665.7 billion by 2033 after being valued at $225.3 billion in 2023, according to Allied Market Research.

Putting it in context

Pyramid's platform uses a combination of machine learning and AI to simplify processes and data analysis for its clients, which include the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as well as Hallmark, Deloitte and Volkswagen.

The Amsterdam-incorporated company, which has offices in London, New York City and Tel Aviv, declined to disclose its equity valuation following the investment.

Its last funding round, a Series E led by H.I.G. Growth Partners in May 2022, fetched $120 million, taking its total fundraise to over $200 million at the time, according to its website.

More about Pyramid Analytics fundraising efforts on Reuters

What Is “Reasoning” In Modern AI?

Professor Swarat Chaudhuri from the University of Texas at Austin and visiting researcher at Google DeepMind discusses breakthroughs in AI reasoning, theorem proving, and mathematical discovery.

Chaudhuri explains his groundbreaking work on COPRA (a GPT-based prover agent), shares insights on neurosymbolic approaches to AI.

The New Tablestakes, AI Tools That Go To Work

AI goes to work. It’s a central message that we’ll all hear repeatedly next year throughout 2025. There’s an undercurrent running through the technology industry that suggests we may need to start thinking about the practical application of artificial intelligence and machine learning.

It will no longer be acceptable (we hope) for vendors to simply say “look! we’ve just added AI to our platform” and although we’re a very long way indeed from AI simply being a functionality rather than a fanfare in its own right (that won’t happen inside this decade), we may be at a turning point where the tech glitterati start to realize the need to talk about solid software solutions.

Kyle Campos agrees with this sentiment. As chief technology & product officer (CTPO) at FinOps and cloud ROI platform company CloudBolt, Campos is used to conversations that get to the bottom line (financially, literally) quicker than some. He thinks that now is the time for AI in the cloud to moves from simply spotting and identfyig things to actually doing things.

The New AI Tablestakes

"Beyond data crunching and spitting out so-called ‘insights’, AI-driven automation that turns insights into actions, automatically optimizes cloud performance and spend… and reduces the insight-to-action gap will become the new tablestakes by the end of 2025,” asserts Kampos. “Agentic AI will now gain rapid adoption and be integrated into workflows to accelerate AI impact such that the industry begins seeing ‘near-realtime FinOps’ for the first time. This is the point at which AI begins playing a bigger role in spotting anomalies and making decisions at moments of truth at the edge as organizations continue finding ways to shift left.”

More about AI tools that go to work on Forbes

From Siri to AI Agents | Tom Gruber Live at Spark Accelerate 2024

Join Tom Gruber, co-founder of Siri, for an illuminating exploration of AI's evolution and future potential. Drawing from his pioneering experience, Gruber examines how AI has progressed from early digital assistants to today's sophisticated systems, whilst discussing the crucial balance between automation and human augmentation. He offers valuable insights into AI's transformative potential for education, creativity and global equality, alongside thoughtful consideration of the ethical challenges ahead.

We’ve partnered with the Logictry AI platform to help evangelize their solutions for a variety of vertical applications. Here’s a case study highlighting National Instruments.

Discover more and interact with the self-led demo on Logictry’s website, and message me directly to start making smarter decisions faster with the Logictry AI platform.

The Top AI Use Cases Of 2024 And What You Should Know About Them

Artificial Intelligence is everywhere, even Apple included 'Apple Intelligence' in their iPhone 16 release (whether we want it or not). While 2023 was characterized by AI awareness and hype, 2024 ushered in experimentation and deployments for businesses and individuals. This article examines the top AI use cases of 2024.

At the start of the year, the allure of AI's potential prompted many organizations to consider wholesale implementations of AI across various functions, some with success and some with failure. This enthusiasm was often driven by board mandates or the fear of missing out (FOMO). Regardless of the trigger, the year has been fraught with mixed results because of the one crucial fact we keep overlooking: AI is a tool to augment human capabilities, not the other way around.

How AI is Being Deployed

This Forbes article, underscores this point and the importance of mitigating intellectual atrophy as we continue to adopt more technology in our every day lives. Successful AI integration hinges on understanding then leveraging its core strengths – scale and speed – to amplify, accelerate, and expedite time consuming and non-thought provoking tasks for us.

At the start we took a wholesale approach to AI – it can solve everything for us. Luckily, reality set in and we discovered it can’t do everything. Furthermore, there were concerns around hallucinations and lack of transparency, but innovative entities like Perplexity.AI are providing an alternative to search by pioneering transparent AI by – providing users transparency into the data sources used in its AI response back to you (unlike ChatGPT). This approach, which I term 'Conscious Capitalism,' aims to increase the adoption of AI, while building credibility and ensure there’s a Human In The Loop (Chapter 6 of this book), echoing President Reagan's maxim, "Trust, but verify."

More on top AI use cases of 2024 on Forbes

Databricks CEO on Super AGI and Unlocking AI’s Untapped Potential

Ali Ghodsi, CEO of Databricks (now a $61B company), has become one of the top minds in AI, evolving from researcher to leading one of the biggest AI-centered private companies. In our conversation, he broke down the AI hype cycle in detail and made bold predictions for the future. He also shared his biggest operating lessons from scaling Databricks to a market leader and pivotal moments in his journey.

Marc Benioff says we've reached the 'upper limits' of LLMs

Tech titan Benioff says we're near the "upper limits" of use in AI advancement - the future, he says, is AI agents

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, in an episode of The Wall Street Journal's "Future of Everything" podcast, said he thinks the future of AI advancement lies in autonomous agents — not the large language models used to train bots like ChatGPT.

"I actually think we're hitting the upper limits of the LLMs right now," Benioff said.

Over the last several years, Benioff said, we've all "got drunk on the ChatGPT Kool-Aid," leading the average consumer to believe that AI is more powerful than it is and that LLMs are key to advancement in the technology. But there is a burgeoning use of artificial intelligence — autonomous agents, which can be deployed to conduct tasks independently, such as executing sales communications or marketing campaigns — that he says will be more significant than LLMs have been for companies trying to become more efficient and transform the world of work.

Salesforce offers prebuilt and customizable AI agents for clients seeking to automate customer service tasks. OpenAI is closing in on a launch date for its own agents, which Bloomberg reported will be able to complete assigned tasks like writing code or booking travel.

Cerebral Valley: How to Train Your Robot

A panel discussion with Srikanth Thirumalai (Waymo), Tessa Lau (Dusty Robotics), and Jonathan Hurst (Agility Robotics), moderated by James Wilsterman.

Thats all for today, however new advancements, investments, and partnerships are happening as you read this. AI is moving fast, subscribe today to stay informed.