The Innovator's Radar newsletter enables you to stay on top of the latest business innovations. Enjoy this week's edition.
Jennifer L. Schenker
Innovator Founder and Editor-in-Chief |
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If Physical Intelligence, an AI start-up seeking to create “brains” for a wide variety of robots, has its way, people will be able to ask robots to perform any task they want.
The company, which is joining the race to bring general-purpose AI into the physical world, announced November 4 that it had raised $400 million, in a financing round led by Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s executive chairman, and the venture capital firms Thrive Capital and Lux Capital. Other investors include OpenAI, Redpoint Ventures and Bond. The fund-raising valued the company, which was launched this year, at $2.4 billion, not including the new investment.
It is the latest example of how the prospects for robots that help with everything from household chores to handling hazardous waste have improved as progress in artificial intelligence accelerates and investment in the sector grows faster than anticipated. The total addressable market for humanoid robots is projected to reach $38 billion by 2035, up more than sixfold from a previous projection of $6 billion, according to a Goldman Sachs report.
Read on to get the key takeaways from this story and learn about this week's other important technology news impacting business. |
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| Around the world, healthcare has struggled with uneven access and quality for decades. To try and change that dynamic healthcare professionals, such as the President and CEO of the world-renowned Mayo Clinic, have publicly urged a move from traditional, linear pipeline-service-model thinking to a platform approach that fundamentally changes how healthcare and advance cures are provided.
The need is there. “There is a big gap between consumer expectations and what health care systems offer today,” says Laure Claire Reillier, Co-founder and CEO of Launchworks & Co, the organizer of the November 13 Platform Leaders conference in London. “They are used to choice, convenience and speed when they book a taxi, or a holiday and the platform economy plays a huge part in that. If you compare that with healthcare services, it is like day and night.”
Healthcare systems are huge, run in silos, are fragmented and full of inefficiencies and complexities. “Platforms can be part of the answer to coordinate participants and help orchestrate the emerging healthcare systems of tomorrow," she says. Since they are smaller and nimble, they can begin by complimenting existing services and eventually transform them.”
Read on to learn about emerging European and U.S. healthcare platforms.
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Who: Harsh Vardhan is Global Head, Digital Innovation for Apollo Tyres, an Indian company that sells tires in 100+ countries. He is responsible for driving AI-first digital innovation, fostering both top-down and bottom-up innovation cultures, and for implementing other cutting-edge technologies such AR/VR, and digital twins to transform business processes, enhance manufacturing efficiency, and accelerate sustainability goals. Under his leadership Apollo Tyres has launched six enterprise-grade Gen AI pilot projects, half of them with young companies based at Hyderabad’s T-Hub, one of the world’s largest innovation accelerators.
Topic: Open innovation and how to scale AI
Quote: "When applied on top of clean data, process improvements and cross functional employee collaboration GenAI is not just the icing on the cake but an effective accelerator of Intelligent Automation."
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| It's no surprise that research firm Gartner has named Agentic AI a top strategic technology trend in 2025. Capgemini reports that 10% of large enterprises are already using AI agents, more than half plan to use them in the next year and 82% will adopt them within the next three years.
“The speed of adoption is mind blowing - it is something we have never seen before - but it is also introducing new attack surfaces,” says Ben Kliger, CEO of Zenity, a startup that is aiming to bring application security to the world of enterprise AI agents.
Customers include Fortune 500 companies in financial services, healthcare, and pharmaceuticals.
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Reuters reported that shares of Nvidia rallied to a record high on November 7, making the AI chipmaker the first company in history to surpass this stock market value as Wall Street extended a rally sparked by Donald Trump's return to the White House. Others also benefited from Trump's win. The Bloomberg Billionaires Index estimated that the world’s 10 wealthiest people – a list dominated by U.S. tech billionaires - gained nearly $64 billion on November 6, the largest daily increase since the index began in 2012. Elon Musk, the world’s richest person and a prominent backer of Trump’s campaign, benefited from a surge in the share price of Tesla, the electric carmaker where he is chief executive and in which he owns a 13% stake. Other beneficiaries were Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, Larry Ellison, the chair of the software company Oracle, Microsoft’s co-founder Bill Gates and Google’s co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Much of the gains for the top 10 was because of a surge in U.S. stocks after the election as investors anticipated a low-tax and regulation-light policy platform.
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