Toronto-based startup Kepler Communications closed another tranche of capital to continue building out its on-orbit data network.

The new funding, which comes to $92 million, will be used to launch a constellation of optical communications satellites next year. Those satellites will join Kepler’s existing network of 19 radio-frequency satellites operating in sun-synchronous orbits (SSO). Two more satellites are scheduled to join that constellation with the launch of SpaceX’s Transporter-7 mission next week.

According to Kepler’s website, the new optical relay network will deliver data at 2.5 Gbps to satellites in low Earth orbit. The company plans to place the optical communications satellites in “two near-orthogonal planes” in SSO to enable continuous connection. The network infrastructure will act as internet exchange points for in-space data relay, similar to how internet traffic is exchanged on Earth, and enable real-time data relays between spacecraft and to Earth.

The new funding was led by IA Ventures, which has been investing in Kepler since its seed round in 2016. Other participating investors include Costanoa Ventures, Canaan Partners, Tribe Capital and BDC Capital’s Industrial Innovation Venture Fund. Kepler’s now raised more than $200 million to date.

“Exponentially decreasing launch costs make space more accessible than ever, but connectivity beyond Earth is still costly, challenging, and inconsistent,” IA Ventures general partner Brad Gillespie said in a statement. He added that the network provides connectivity between assets in space and Earth, and “someday to Mars and beyond.”

Kepler will launch two satellites this year to test and validate the optical communication technology. In addition to satellites, Kepler operates its own ground stations and in-house satellite production facilities.

Funding comes on the heels of a strong 2022, where Quantifind achieved rapid growth, including a contract for $23.7M from the Department of Defense and partnerships with anti-trafficking NGOs

PALO ALTO, Calif., March 1, 2023 /PRNewswire/ — Quantifind, a leading provider of AI-powered financial crimes risk management solutions, announced it has raised $23 million in funding led by DNS Capital, with participation from Citi Ventures, US Venture Partners, Valor Equity Partners, and S&P Global. The funding comes after a strong 2022 that included signing four of the world’s largest banks, new contracts from the Department of Defense, including a $23.7 million production contract, signing deals with leading universities and establishing partnerships with the United for Wildlife taskforce and the Polaris Financial Intelligence Unit to fight human trafficking.

New Funding will Accelerate Business Growth and Customer Success

Quantifind will use the funding to expand its footprint in international markets, grow global brand recognition, and enhance its solutions for financial crimes investigation, continuous customer monitoring, alerts triage, and supply chain risk screening.

“As the financial markets continue to evolve, it is critical for risk management teams to develop dynamic detection capabilities to prevent and mitigate financial crime and global threats,” said Vibhor Rastogi, Global Head of AI/ML/Data Investing at Citi Ventures. “Quantifind is uniquely poised to deliver the data coverage, rich feature set, and detection accuracy grounded in science that global risk specialists across industry and government need to be effective at fighting financial crime and emerging threats.”

Quantifind’s Graphyte™ Platform is the Ideal Solution in a Global Macro Economy Experiencing High Regulatory and Cost-efficiency Demand.

“Quantifind is an essential part of our risk management strategy. We see upwards of 40% productivity gains for investigations and 75% of high-risk cases automatically triaged,” said a representative of one of Canada’s big five banks and financial services companies.

Quantifind also supports nonprofits by lending its intelligence software to the Polaris Financial Intelligence Unit against human trafficking and the United for Wildlife taskforce. These organizations use the Quantifind risk intelligence platform to understand the financial patterns that signal human trafficking red flags. This intelligence is shared with financial services and law enforcement leaders. Furthermore, these thought-leading nonprofits provide industry expertise as feedback to Quantifind machine-learned risk typologies to power a paradigm for risk standards. Quantifind will host two events this year with Polaris and the United for Wildlife task force.

Product Innovation Fuels Customer Advancement

Looking to 2023 and in line with its mission to help global risk specialists overcome the mounting pressures of budget cuts, less staff, and tighter regulations; organizations use the Quantifind Graphyte™ automation platform to:

“Global financial institutions and governments value Quantifind’s ability to automatically uncover risk signals from disparate and unstructured data sources,” said Quantifind CEO and co-founder Ari Tuchman. “We continue to raise the data science bar in the fight against financial crimes and hidden threats with a commitment to accuracy, speed, and seamless integration into client workflows.”

About Quantifind
Quantifind’s AI-powered automation uncovers relevant risk signals from disparate and unstructured data to help risk specialists investigate people and organizations faster and more accurately. Quantifind’s Graphyte™ automation platform maximizes risk intelligence workflows by delivering superior entity resolution, dynamic risk typologies, knowledge graph technology, and name science. Quantifind is a top provider to tier 1 banks, digital banks, financial institutions, and government organizations for the following use cases: Know Your Customer (KYC), Customer Due Diligence (CDD), Fraud Risk Management, and Anti-Money Laundering (AML).  These organizations benefit from proven outcomes: 75% reduction in false positives, 50% improvement in investigative efficiency, and daily screening of the entire vendor/donor base with >90% name resolution accuracy.

Quantifind is headquartered in Palo Alto, with teams in Boston, Washington, Atlanta, Madrid, London, and New York.
For more information on Quatifind: https://www.quantifind.com

It’s tough in the current economic climate to hire and retain engineers focused on system admin, DevOps and network architecture. In a recent Gartner survey, IT executives cited talent shortages as the top barrier to adopting emerging technologies. Unfortunately for execs, at the same time recruiting is posing a major challenge, IT infrastructure is becoming more costly to maintain. Business monitoring company Anodot reports that nearly half of corporations are finding it difficult to get cloud costs alone under control.

Aiming to overcome some of the blockers to success in IT, Lucas Roh co-founded MetalSoft, a startup that provides “bare metal” automation software for managing on-premises data centers and multi-vendor equipment. MetalSoft allows companies to automate the orchestration of hardware, including switches, servers and storage, making them available to users that can be consumed on-demand.

MetalSoft spun out from Hostway, a cloud hosting provider headquartered in Chicago. Hostway developed software to power cloud service provider hardware, which went into production in 2014. In 2019, the software spun out as a separate company — MetalSoft — with the goal of broadening its capabilities to service additional service providers and enterprises.

“We provide a turnkey solution to service providers to offer … cloud services,” Roh told TechCrunch in an email interview. “We’re differentiated from others in that we automate and manage the full stack [of infrastructure], including switches, servers, storage and networking as well as cloud enablement.”

So how does that solve the talent shortage and cost overruns in tech? Well, Roh — who previously helped to launched cloud provider Bigstep and the aforementioned Hostway — asserts that MetalSoft’s software can eliminate many of the problems associated with hardware silos, reducing the complexity of managing them to the point where non-technical consumers can build their own infrastructure. By allowing customers to pull workloads back from the cloud and run them in-house if they so wish, MetalSoft can bring down IT costs while offering a higher level of control, including security posture, Roh argues.

For instance, MetalSoft can automatically deploy and configure operating systems and firmware upgrades while discovering running hardware on a network. It also can auto-configure storage volumes and storage-related system network settings, generating a visual blueprint that captures a company’s infrastructure, including servers, storage and networking.

Roh says that MetalSoft’s targeting both enterprises that have their own equipment (for example, in a data center or co-location facility) as well as cloud service providers that want to offer “bare metal as a service” or “private cloud as a service” products to their customers (think a provider deploying infrastructure to a client’s on-premises server room). It’s early days — MetalSoft landed its first customers last year, and the company isn’t talking revenue or operating cash flow at the moment — but Roh claims that MetalSoft’s solution is beginning to gain traction in the marketplace.

“We have some major enterprise customers with hundreds of thousands of devices that we are not revealing but include a major telco and major data center and cloud service providers, and have a strong partnership with major OEM,” Roh said. “In the past couple of years, we’ve especially focused on adding many enterprise features and support for more hardware vendors.”

While MetalSoft competes with heavyweights like Cisco and OpenStack, it’s likely to benefit from the recent uptick in investment in on-premises infrastructure. During the past year, 30% of organizations moved workloads or data from the public cloud back to a private cloud or on-premises or colocation facility, according to a report from the Uptime Institute. Their primary reasons were cost, regulatory compliance, performance issues and perceived concerns over security, the report said.

“We help reduce the cost of IT and we have become even more important in a more stringent spending environment … Our software can help reduce the technical labor requirements while significantly reducing cost while delivering the full functionality to their end-users.” Roh said. “After the spinout [from Hostway], we continue improving our product, especially in terms of the enterprise features that customers need.”

MetalSoft, which has around 40 employees, has raised $17 million in venture capital to date; $16 million came from its Series A that closed this week, led by DNS Capital. Roh says that the proceeds will be put toward growing MetalSoft’s sales and marketing functions and product development.

“We have done quite a bit of work on AI and machine learning that’s not yet part of our software stack,” Roh added. “We are currently working to incorporate AI and machine learning to intelligently manage and monitor bare metal hardware. We’ll be excited to introduce that product the second half of next year.”

In our first installation, we’re taking stock of the sensational rise of this new technology: its origins and recent explosion into public awareness, the record-breaking deals funding its ascent, and the regulation that is (or isn’t) governing the space. Plus, read on for our predictions about what comes next. 

With 25 billion+ pieces of synthetic content online, it’s clear that generative AI makes content easier than ever to create – even as it produces new obstacles to understanding where an image or a fragment of text is coming from – and whether it’s real or fake.

You might have heard about the challenges creators face in tracing the use of their work by others – and in exercising control over what it is transformed into by AI. That’s not just a problem for the artists, writers, and designers among us; it has implications for everyone. How will we determine what’s real and what’s fake in a world where attribution is impossible? Who – and what – will we trust to authenticate the words, images, sounds, and videos that AI models spit out into the digital ether?

Our reports will span the generative AI space but we’ll return to questions of authentication from one quarter to the next as we grapple with the future of content as we know it.

So mused Alan Turing in the opening of his 1950 paper introducing “the imitation game” now known as the Turing test. More than 70 years since the publication of that groundbreaking work on artificial intelligence, people are still debating the answer. There’s no question that AI has extended our ability to analyze the world around us in the decades since.

AI helps us detect patterns in everyday life, predicting when our packages will arrive or suggesting which video we should watch next on YouTube. This traditional or “analytical” AI supplements our ability to assess things that already exist, but not our capacity to create new content.  

The development of latent diffusion — the technology behind what we call generative AI — flipped the script. Latent diffusion models are machine learning models that learn the underlying structure of a dataset and map it to a small sample of a 512 x 512 image, known as “latent space”. Essentially, the models learn the right patterns of data and then replicate them on a smaller scale, which builds to a bigger result that we can recognize — a new image, text, sound, etc. that captures the relevant style. 

In practice, what this means is that a user can enter a plain text prompt, such as “A picture of a horse” and a picture of a horse is generated. 

Now, dozens of companies offer tools capable of creating new, never-before-seen text, images, audio, and video that rival art created by humans in beauty and meaning.   

Many creators see this as an existential threat. “Art is dead, dude. It’s over. A.I. won,” one creator told the New York Times this September. The concern is familiar. 

Fears of new creative modes making old, human-dependent ones obsolete have a long history. In 1859, poet and art critic Charles Beaudelaire fretted about a new way to capture images, writing, “If photography is allowed to supplement art in some of its functions, it will soon have supplanted or corrupted it altogether.”  

More recently, musicians saw themselves pitted against nameless, faceless “pirates” making their songs available online to the masses for free.  

But of course, today painters still paint, and musicians still make music. Why? Because the creators and the technologists — and their lawyers — were able to hammer out a middle ground. For generative AI, the key is authentication…

The reasons are manifold: people will want to quickly generate content in their own style, for their own use or enjoyment.  

Think, for instance, of being able to generate a new song in the style of your favorite bands, on-demand; or writing an entire paper in your voice by typing a few prompt phrases; or a synthetic version of you answering questions at work — and you’ve approved of all of this. The list goes on. 

We need quick, easy, and transparent ways to determine the lineage of content and track derivatives so that everyone can be fairly compensated and credited for their work. 

At Vermillio we call these solutions, “Authenticated AI.”  Major generative AI platforms don’t yet afford users the ability to determine who has created what or where it came from. At Vermillio, we believe that this level of verification is not only crucial for ownership reasons but also for determining what content is real and what’s fake. The lineage of everything created on our platform is traced on blockchain, enabling — for the very first time — AI-generated images and all derivatives to be properly attributed and owned. All creations have a digital signature and verifiable “public receipt.”

Generative AI holds enormous potential to galvanize human creativity. It can be used for everything from image enhancements – people jazzing up their selfies – to the generation of wholly new images – for instance, advertising agencies using text-to-image generation to speed up and enrich the storyboarding process. 

Firms are racing to invest in more than 160 start-ups that have been launched in this space just this year alone. To date, nearly 500 startups have been engaged in the Generative AI space. 

In the last 12 months, Generative AI has swapped places with cryptocurrency in search interest according to Google Trends. At the 2023 CES trade show that took place in January, more than 550 exhibitors were listed in the show’s “Artificial Intelligence” category, which was more than double Metaverse (176), Cryptocurrency (19), and Blockchain (55) combined.  And, according to (in our view) a lowball estimate from Grand View Research, the generative AI market is expected to be worth $109.37 billion by 2030. 

Perhaps there was no surer sign that generative AI had broken through to the mainstream, though, than the backlash that came alongside general amazement at the technology’s capabilities. In the latter half of 2022, artists, educators, and corporate IP holders like Getty Images took their concerns to the press — and in the case of Getty and several creators, to the courts — meaning that those previously unacquainted with generative AI likely had a negative first impression of the innovation.  

No, AI will not replace you, but it will completely change the world.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang summed up what comes next: “Over the course of the next 10 years… I believe we’re going to accelerate AI by another million times.” Huang’s right, but he doesn’t go far enough – over the course of the next 10 years, we believe we’re going to accelerate AI by another billion times. We are experiencing a societal shift in which the concept of creation is moving away from that of physical goods to one of digital goods. From Roblox’s undeniable popularity to Epic’s recent announcement of their new digital marketplace, Fab, the creation and ownership of digital goods is becoming overwhelmingly important.

Just a few years ago, generative AI struggled to gain credibility among investors.  

Fast-forward to 2022. As the crypto winter set in, investors looking for the next big thing flocked to generative AI after a series of attention-grabbing releases. 

According to CB Insights, last year saw a record $2.6 billion of equity investment in generative AI startups across 110 deals, up from $271 million in 2020. Another source estimates the total enterprise value of the generative AI space to be about $48 billion. 

Venture capital, of course, played a major role, with investors comparing the emergence of generative AI to the dawn of mobile technology or the internet itself. A publication from Sequoia Capital stated that generative AI had “the potential to generate trillions of dollars of economic value.” 

But it’s not just VC firms leading the way — perhaps the most important deals to keep an eye on are the blockbuster acquisitions and partnerships by established tech giants — most notably Microsoft’s extended, $10 billion deal with Open AI.   

And the money can flow out just as quickly as it can flow in. Google, for example, saw a $100 billion decrease in its valuation after its generative AI chatbot, Bard, came up with the wrong answer to a question in an ad.   

The rush to pour money into generative AI is reminiscent, of course, of tech investing’s most famous cautionary tale: the dot-com bubble.

Clearly, we’re still in the proliferation phase, with new companies popping up and investors eager to fund them. But this time, things are different. AI touches — or will soon touch — all aspects of human life, because, as researchers like Ajay Agrawal have pointed out, prediction — AI’s fundamental strength — is involved in every decision we make.

In the meantime, financiers would do well to remember that bandwagons seldom offer a free ride; in the end, the cream will rise to the top, and those with anything less will pay the price.

These days, conversations about the future of work usually feature raised voices lamenting the job-displacing effects of generative AI. AI’s critics point to the technology’s uncanny capacity for producing human-sounding text; its ability to mimic the styles of human artists; and its skillful manipulation of old music into new sounds as omens of the coming revolution in creative and white-collar work.

Even proponents are predicting a major revolution in how we allocate work. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella IBM framed it as a question of support and not replacement. “I see these technologies acting as a co-pilot, helping people do more with less,” he explained.

Anxieties about robots coming for our jobs are hardly new. In the early 19th century, Luddites destroyed machinery in textile factories across England. More recently, Elon Musk predicted that we will one day “exceed a one-to-one ratio of humanoid robots to humans.”

It’s not that these fears are overblown (many Luddites really were made permanently redundant) but that they fail to account for AI’s upsides.

Taking a global view, it’s clear that the technology has the potential to radically level the playing field. The average AI effects salary is 75k per year in the US but only 19k in Kenya. That may change as users without formal programming training are newly equipped to imagine and create entire worlds, from films to video games.

One thing is clear: as generative AI suffuses the global economy we will need reliable ways of authenticating its products.

Last month, CNET published over 70 AI-generated articles rife with inaccuracies, including one story that gave readers the wrong formula for calculating compound interest. Despite the oversight, the publisher laid off about 10% of its writing staff a week later to focus on its “tech stack.”

The real question remains: how long will it be before generative AI systems get good enough that we can fully trust their outputs without the risk of “hallucinations”? It could happen before the next installment of this report.

In the first quarter of 2023, three lawsuits — one filed by a group of artists, two by media giant Getty Images — made the first attempt at putting the brakes on generative AI. The plaintiffs allege that the tech platforms named in the suits infringe upon copyrights by using creative works to train image-generation algorithms without permission. Generative AI companies, on the other hand, view their datasets as upholding fair use doctrine and the suits as hurdles to innovation.   

At Vermillio, we’ve spent the past three years having conversations with people on all sides of this debate. What we’ve learned is that balancing the interests of content owners big and small with those of generative AI firms is not only possible — but essential. 

Creators should be fairly credited and compensated for their work in the digital world — period.

Recent history has shown that this can be done; consider the series of legal disputes that set a new status quo for the digital music industry in the early 2000s. Though the current state of affairs is not perfect, music piracy was curtailed and everyone is all the better for it: streaming platforms pay artists, and music is widely available to listeners at a reasonable cost.  

As the legal framework develops, creators and tech platforms will need mechanisms to ensure seamless compliance with laws and ethical standards. In the US, lawmakers have begun to call for regulation at the state and federal level and you can expect to see local legislatures move fast to establish norms protecting a range of uses, including in governance and government intelligence. 

Meanwhile, a supreme court decision against the use of training data could spell the end of not just AI as a tool for governance but also as a driver of everything from your Netflix algorithms to ChatGPT. (We’re already staring down versions of this outcome with the European Parliament set to vote on new risk-based regulations and Italy having issued a temporary ban on ChatGPT over concerns that the tool could violate the country’s standards on data collection.)

Expect to see even more dots on our Eye on AI chart for next quarter. New launches in the space will continue for the foreseeable future — but at some point the rubber will have to meet the road. 

The birth of the internet again provides a useful analogy: in the early days of the internet, there were many more web browsers than what we see and use today.  

So, in generative AI, what will separate the winners from the losers?  

Though there’s still much that remains to be seen, two things are abundantly clear: one, without a way to authenticate AI-generated creations, the adoption of this technology will hit roadblocks, and those roadblocks in turn will stifle the creativity that can be enabled by embracing generative AI to enhance — not replace — human creativity.    

Two, the appetite for using generative AI to make creations based on the most beloved IP in the world — film and TV franchises, book series, and artists — will only grow. 

The ways in which this technology can create new experiences for fans to engage with their favorite content are endless. Imagine if six-year-olds could create new characters with AI that had been trained on their favorite superheroes. Think of a child who could not dance, generating a synthetic version of themself that dances to songs from their favorite movie.

The whirlwind of attention that generative AI has attracted over the past year has given the technology no shortage of both fans and detractors. How tech platforms maintain the former and convert the latter hinges on their ability to build trust among everyone involved. The need for solutions that make tracing, tracking, and verifying the lineage of content and their derivatives, at this moment in time, cannot be emphasized enough. 

Vermillio is the first – and only – generative AI platform built to empower creators and protect their work. 

Using our platform, artists, studios, and intellectual property owners can track and authenticate generative AI as well as the use of their work by others in order to receive fair credit and compensation. 

Exercising control over their IP even as it is transformed by AI, creators large and small can engage directly with their fans, quickly and easily bringing new and immersive experiences to life in the style of the world’s most beloved IP.

Velocity Truck Centers (VTC), the leading group of commercial vehicle dealerships in the Southwest, is pleased to announce that the company has expanded into the Southeast with the acquisition of Neely Coble Company, Inc. This acquisition extends VTC’s reach from California, Arizona, Hawaii and Nevada into central Tennessee, northern Alabama and southern Kentucky. Neely Coble’s primary locations sell and service the Freightliner, Western Star and Isuzu brands from locations in the Nashville, TN, Huntsville/Decatur AL, and Bowling Green KY metropolitan areas.

With the addition of these locations VTC continues as one of the largest Freightliner and Western Star dealership groups in the country with more than 30 locations and over 1,800 employees. Existing operations and announced acquisitions generate in excess of $2 billion in worldwide annual revenue from commercial vehicle sales, service, parts, collision and fabrication centers, and equipment financing. VTC will bring its unparalleled customer focus, including two-hour Express Assessment, Elite Support Certification and equipment financing through its Crossroads Equipment Lease and Finance division, to markets in the Southeast.

From Brad Fauvre, Co-President of VTC, “We are very excited to extend Velocity Truck Center’s reach to the rapidly growing markets in the Southeast. We will now be able to take care of our customers operating in a broad area of the US from East to West. VTC is committed to providing exceptional support for our customers and a great place to work, and we know that the Neely Coble Company employees will help us to accomplish these goals.” Adds Conan Barker, Co-President of VTC, “We want to thank Neely Coble III for working with us to complete this transaction, and we enthusiastically welcome Neely Coble IV and Edward Coble who will join our management team and ensure continuity of customer service as we navigate the transition. We could not be more pleased to have both of them as our partners going forward. In addition our whole management team looks forward to growing together with our new team members and Southeastern customers in the coming years.”

Neely Coble III added “We feel very fortunate to join Velocity Truck Centers. Neely Coble Company was founded in 1951 by my grandfather and father and now we are in the fourth generation of Cobles. Personally, I could not be happier that my two sons, Neely and Edward, are continuing their careers with VTC and we welcome them to Nashville and the Southeast.”

Velocity Truck Centers, a part of the Velocity Vehicle Group (VVG), operates commercial vehicle dealerships across California, Arizona, Nevada and Hawaii. VTC provides new & used commercial vehicle sales, including the full spectrum from pickup trucks to delivery vans to 18-wheelers and school busses, as well as aftermarket parts and service support, along with a multitude of other vehicle-related services. VTC is an authorized dealer for the Freightliner, Western Star, Autocar, Ford, Fuso, Thomas Built Buses, Sprinter, Isuzu, Hino Trucks, SportTruck, Renegade RV, Rosenbauer fire, Crane Carrier and Freightliner Custom Chassis vehicle brands. VVG also offers equipment financing through its Crossroads Equipment Lease and Finance subsidiary, as well as small business and SBA loans through Velocity SBA and truck rental and leasing through Velocity Truck Rental and Leasing.

Velocity Truck Centers (VTC) is pleased to announce that the company has expanded further into the Southeast with the acquisition of the Triad Freightliner, Triad Freightliner of Kingsport, West Carolina Freightliner, Carolina Freightliner and H&H Freightliner (Triad/H&H). These acquisitions extend VTC’s reach into North Carolina from California, Arizona, Hawaii, Nevada, central Tennessee, northern Alabama and southern Kentucky. Triad/H&H’s locations sell and service the Freightliner and Western Star brands from 9 locations in northeastern Tennessee and North Carolina.

VTC now consists of 53 locations across the US, including 11 body shops, and offering coast-to-coast coverage of commercial vehicle sales, service, parts, collision and fabrication services as well as equipment financing. VTC will bring its unparalleled customer focus, including two-hour Express Assessment, Elite Support Certification and equipment financing through its Crossroads Equipment Lease and Finance division, to Triad/H&H’s markets in North Carolina and Tennessee.

From Brad Fauvre and Conan Barker, Co-Presidents of VTC, “We are very pleased to increase our reach in the Southeast to be able to take care of our customers through North Carolina and Eastern Tennessee, a natural extension to our existing mid-south locations in Tennessee, Alabama and Kentucky. We want to thank Larry Tysinger for working with us to complete this transaction. Larry was one of the founding Freightliner dealers in 1978 and it has been an honor to work with him and take-up his mantle of leadership in the South. We have enjoyed getting to know his organization’s over 400 employees as we welcome them into the VTC family, as we likewise welcome his customers with whom we look forward to carrying on his tradition of dedicated customer service.”

Larry Tysinger added, “I have enjoyed working with Brad and Conan who executed the deal quickly and exactly as we had agreed. I know that my customers and employees are in good hands, and I wouldn’t feel comfortable unless I truly believed VTC would continue our legacy of absolute commitment to our employees and customers.”

Velocity Truck Centers, a part of the Velocity Vehicle Group (VVG), operates 53 commercial vehicle dealership locations in the US across California, Arizona, Nevada, Tennessee, Kentucky, North Carolina, Alabama and Hawaii. VVG also operates 15 Daimler dealerships across Australia, as well as 4 locations in Baja Mexico. VTC provides new & used commercial vehicle sales, including the full spectrum from pickup trucks to delivery vans to 18-wheelers and school buses, as well as aftermarket parts and service support, along with a multitude of other vehicle-related services. VTC is an authorized dealer for the Freightliner, Western Star, Autocar, Ford, Fuso, Thomas Built Buses, Sprinter, Isuzu, Hino Trucks, SportTruck, Renegade RV, Rosenbauer fire, Crane Carrier, Great Dane and Freightliner Custom Chassis vehicle brands. VVG also offers equipment financing through its Crossroads Equipment Lease and Finance subsidiary, as well as small business and SBA loans through Velocity SBA and truck rental and leasing through Velocity Truck Rental and Leasing.

Velocity Vehicle Group (VVG) is pleased to announce the completion of the previously announced transaction to acquire Eager Automotive Limited’s (AX: APE) Daimler truck business. As of today, Velocity Vehicle Group will take-over all Daimler Truck and Bus sales and service dealerships operated by the Eagers Automotive group across Australia. This business employs approximately 650 people at metropolitan and regional locations across Australia, including Brisbane, Newcastle, Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth.

Velocity Vehicle Group is one of the largest Daimler Trucks dealership networks in the United States, serving customer across more than 30 dealership locations in major US markets.

Just like its US operation, Velocity Vehicle Group’s Australian network will only sell and service commercial vehicles, with a firm focus on the unique needs of truck and bus customers. It will also exclusively represent Daimler brands Mercedes-Benz, Freightliner and Fuso.

From Brad Fauvre and Conan Barker, Co-Presidents of VVG, “we are very pleased to reach today’s milestone and to welcome the Australian Daimler Truck and Bus Dealerships of Eagers Automotive to the VVG Family. There is a lot of important work ahead of us to deliver on the vast potential that this team has to offer and to take on such an important footprint for Daimler in Australia. We want to thank Eagers for working together with us to acquire their Daimler trucks business and we wish them the best in their future endeavours”.

“In the US we are one of the largest Daimler Truck dealer groups, with a hard-earned reputation for doing everything we need to do to deliver Speed, Value and Trust for our customers every day. Our team has successfully integrated a number of dealer acquisitions into the VVG family, with great results, and we are confident we can do the same now in Australia. We know we welcome a dedicated team across our Australian dealerships, and we are sure that together with their US VVG colleagues and the dedicated management team in Australia, we will be able to deliver world-class service to the Australian truck market. We look forward to getting to know our Australian customers and employees as we execute on our mission of Speed, Value and Trust”.

From Richard Higgins, Executive Vice President VVG Australia, “the Velocity culture is marked by a real focus on continuous improvement, transparency and a willingness from everyone from top to bottom to pitch-in to help each other and drive great results for customers. The VVG culture and values fit well with what Australian customers expect and how Australians like to work. I am excited for the team in Australia to become a part of VVG because together we can each be better operators on our respective sides of the Pacific”.

Daimler Truck and Bus President and CEO, Daniel Whitehead, thanked Eagers Automotive for its partnership during a time of growth for Daimler commercial vehicles.

“We have achieved a lot together and I wish them all the best for the future,” he says.

Mr Whitehead says he is excited that Velocity Vehicle Group will be supporting its brands in key markets across Australia.

“We are extremely pleased to work with a group that has such an incredible track record with Daimler Trucks in the United States which consistently delivers on a core commitment to commercial vehicle customers,” he says.

“Daimler currently has the best and most advanced cab-over and conventional trucks in Australia, and they will now be sold and supported by a strengthened dealership network of equal calibre,” Mr Whitehead adds.

Daimler Truck and Bus Australia Aftersales and Network Operations Director, Greg Lovrich, says the significant investment of Velocity Vehicle Group represents a big step forward.

“We have long admired the Velocity Vehicle Group as a shining example of a best-practice commercial vehicle dealership network in a market where Daimler is number one and excellent customer service is critical to doing business,” he says.

“Velocity Vehicle Group knows what it takes to provide the kind of service that truck and bus customers expect from Daimler and we are thrilled about the commitment it is making to the Australian market,” Mr Lovrich adds.

SAN RAFAEL, Calif. & BARCELONA, Spain–(BUSINESS WIRE)–IMIDomics, Inc., a privately held global biotechnology company focused on the discovery and development of new targets and medicines for the treatment of patients with immune-mediated inflammatory diseases (IMIDs), announced today that Evotec SE(FSE: EVT; MDAX/TecDAX, ISIN: DE0005664809; NASDAQ: EVO) has made an equity investment in the company. In conjunction with the investment, an Evotec representative will join the IMIDomics board of directors. No financial details were disclosed.

IMIDs affect nearly 1 in 10 people – limiting quality of life and creating significant challenges to physical and mental well-being. The complexity of these diseases means even getting a diagnosis can be a long-term struggle for patients, and then finding a treatment that works can be a frustrating, time-consuming trial and error process.

This new investment will further advance IMIDomics’ Precision Discovery™ Engine which enables a deep understanding of how IMIDs work within patients via a combination of clinical and computational expertise with patient biological samples from the Vall d’Hebron Hospital IMID Biobank, exclusive access to curated, secure and anonymized clinical data collected from more than 17,000 IMID patients and control subjects from across 150 health centers, and proprietary biomolecular signatures generated by IMIDomics from these same patients. Ultimately, the Engine’s purpose is to discover medicines that will materially impact IMID patients’ lives.

“Evotec and IMIDomics are perfectly aligned on their goal to leverage data to discover and develop precise-acting, effective medicines of the future,” said Dr. Werner Lanthaler, CEO of Evotec. “By joining IMIDomics as a minority shareholder, we are excited to further grow our EVOequity portfolio of highly promising companies with complementary technologies and assets.”

“The still unmet needs in this immense and ever-expanding category of illnesses demand that we leverage patient data holistically to decipher the causes of disease and find treatments. Evotec’s dedication to the use of data in drug discovery is why they are such a strong fit with IMIDomics – they share our core mission of applying intersectional data to uncover the next generation of targeted medicines and companion diagnostic tools needed to more precisely address complex IMID diseases and positively impact the experience and outcomes for people living with them,” said Juan Harrison, CEO of IMIDomics.

IMIDomics was founded in Barcelona, Spain in 2015 by Dr. Sara Marsal, Head of the Rheumatology Department at the Vall d’Hebron University Hospital, and Dr. Richard M. Myers, President and Scientific Director at the HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology. Existing investors in IMIDomics include DNS Capital, Tao Capital, The Pritzker Organization and Bristol Myers Squibb.

To learn more about IMIDomics, please visit www.imidomics.com.

NEW YORK, February 15, 2022–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Kallyope, Inc., a leading biotechnology company focused on identifying and developing therapeutics involving the gut-brain axis, today announced the closing of a $236 million Series D financing co-led by Mubadala Investment Company and The Column Group, along with participation from other new and existing investors. The funds will be used to advance the company’s pioneering drug discovery platform, clinical trials, and pipeline of multiple programs across a broad range of therapeutic areas.

“Since our inception six years ago, Kallyope has pioneered research on the gut-brain axis and developed a transformational drug discovery platform with speed and ingenuity. We are now positioned at the forefront of this space,” said Jay Galeota, president and CEO, Kallyope. “We are pleased with the support of an outstanding group of investors who represent a strong vote of confidence in our science and our team.”- ADVERTISEMENT -https://s.yimg.com/rq/darla/4-10-1/html/r-sf-flx.html

Kallyope has built a highly original platform that integrates several sophisticated technologies for the discovery and translation of gut-brain biology. The gastrointestinal tract is the largest and most accessible drug target in the human body. By revealing the connections between the gut and the brain, the Kallyope platform has been leveraged to generate novel programs spanning several relevant therapeutic areas, including metabolism, immunology and inflammation, and central nervous system disorders. A key element of the Kallyope strategy is to target gut and gut-brain physiology with gut-restricted molecules, a fundamentally new approach anticipated to increase the speed and probability of success of drug discovery and development.

“The founding of Kallyope jump-started our journey to build a preeminent biotech, based in New York City, as a first-mover in the gut-brain axis space,” said Nancy Thornberry, founding CEO and chair, Research and Development, Kallyope. “We have assembled and continue to expand a uniquely experienced team with the leadership and talent necessary to realize our potential. Together we are working to translate our discoveries into pioneering therapeutics poised to address major areas of significant medical need.”

Over the past 13 months, Kallyope has advanced four compounds into the clinic in its two lead programs in Type 2 diabetes, obesity, and diseases of the gastrointestinal barrier. With the new funding, Kallyope will continue to move these trials forward, as well as accelerate progress on more than 20 programs and molecules in the pipeline and further invest in the platform to strengthen long-term leadership in this area.

“Mubadala believes it is of vital importance to help build and support life science and healthcare companies, especially those with a strong vision and truly innovative approach,” said Ibrahim Ajami, head, Ventures and Growth, Mubadala. “To date, the medical field has largely overlooked the role of the gut in the development of disease, though this understanding has the potential to unlock key discoveries in novel therapeutics. Kallyope has been dedicated to establishing a differentiated platform by focusing on the gut-brain axis, and they have demonstrated the potential for meaningful impact in areas of significant medical need. We are excited to work with the Kallyope team to advance their programs and, in this new frontier of drug discovery, ultimately improve human health.”

“Having supported Kallyope from their initial financing, we have witnessed first-hand the remarkable growth of their platform and the promise it holds for significant leaps in drug discovery,” said Tim Kutzkey, PhD, managing partner, The Column Group. “We are proud to continue backing the company’s outstanding team and believe their work will have an important impact.”

Kallyope has raised nearly $480 million to date, including a $112 million Series C financing in March 2020. In addition to co-leads Mubadala and The Column Group, Series D participants include previous investors Alexandria Venture Investments, Bill Gates, Casdin Capital, Euclidean Capital, Illumina Ventures, Lux Capital, Polaris Partners, Two Sigma Ventures and StepStone Group. New investors include DNS Capital, Hartford Healthcare Endowment, Parkwood LLC, and Tao Capital.

About Kallyope

Kallyope, headquartered at the Alexandria Center® for Life Science in New York City, is a biotechnology company dedicated to unlocking the therapeutic potential of the gut-brain axis. The company’s cross-disciplinary team integrates advanced technologies in sequencing, bioinformatics, neural imaging, cellular and molecular biology, and human genetics to provide an understanding of gut-brain biology that leads to transformational therapeutics to improve human health. The company’s founders are Charles Zuker, Ph.D., Lasker Award winner Tom Maniatis, Ph.D., and Nobel laureate Richard Axel, M.D. For more information visit www.kallyope.com.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220215005560/en/

Contacts

Kallyope
Anita Kawatra
media@kallyope.com