A business intelligence start-up pulls in another $20 million.
"There is no chance of a new winter," said Shivon Zilis, an investor at Bloomberg Beta who specializes in machine intelligence start-ups.
SAN FRANCISCO — When Trevor McFedries set out last year to raise money for Brud, his robotics and artificial intelligence start-up, he found himself in many meetings with "a ton of white guy" venture capitalists.
The move follows an article Thursday by The New York Times and ProPublica about an exclusive deal that Memorial Sloan Kettering made with an artificial intelligence start-up to use digital images of 25 million tissue slides analyzed over decades.
Facebook and Amazon are backing Station F. Microsoft is basing its newest artificial intelligence start-up program there, and will be joined by French giants like the video game publisher Ubisoft and overseas players like Line, the Japanese messaging app.
Those conversations never progressed beyond the initial stages, according to Mr. Zuberi, who said he and Mr. Cohen discussed a Manhattan real estate venture, while he and Mr. Broidy discussed an artificial intelligence start-up.
Automakers, including General Motors and Ford, have invested in artificial intelligence start-ups like Cruise Automation and Argo AI in hopes of building the software that will run self-driving cars.
Additional reports detailed how other top officials at Memorial Sloan Kettering had cultivated lucrative relationships with for-profit companies, including an artificial intelligence start-up, Paige.AI, that was founded by a member of the cancer center's executive board, the chairman of its pathology department and the head of one of its research laboratories.
Past deals include Google's purchase of the London-based artificial intelligence start-up DeepMind; Microsoft's acquisition of Mojang, the Swedish maker of popular video game "Minecraft"; and Apple's deal for the music-recognition company Shazam and digital-assistant maker VocalIQ, both of which started in Europe.
