Sber’s AI Ambitions Are Bigger than Banking
Over the past week we’ve been learning more details about Russia’s biggest bank’s Artificial Intelligence ambitions.
Rospatent, Russia’s Federal Service for Intellectual Property, registered the country’s first software program created by AI, Vedomosti reported on July 23. Sber’s software developers used a neural network to teach AI how to code.
The idea of AI taking over software engineers’ jobs is not unique to Russia, with many companies and non-profit initiatives around the world experimenting with the next stage of AI evolution.
What’s interesting about Sber’s AI agenda is the size of the state-owned financial institution and the breadth of its ambitions, well beyond the banking sector alone.
Sber said last year it plans to use AI in almost 100% of its products and generate billions in AI-driven revenue over the next few years after investing $407 million in AI last year, Reuters reported.
Last week, Sber AI Laboratory also presented two AI-powered solutions at the International Conference on Machine Learning. One model showed pneumonia sources in lungs through X-rays with further prioritization of patients who must receive treatment, and another evaluated the risks of severe symptoms in patients hospitalized with pneumonia, including COVID-19 cases.
“AI Lab developers have been designing medical solutions based on machine learning and computer vision for several years now,” says Alexander Vedyakhin, First Deputy Chairman of the Executive Board at Sber. “Sber collaborates with medical institutions in both Moscow and other regions of Russia -- we have seen how the value of such projects has grown in the last year and a half and how they simplify doctors' heavy workloads.”
Also in 2020, Sber organized hackathons, where AI was used for a range of applications, from searching through manuscripts of Russian tsar Peter I to forecasts of river floods.
The full scope of Sber’s AI offerings are still in their early stages of development, but it’s safe to say they will not be limited to the financial sector alone.
LATEST HEADLINES
CLIMATE
> Russia expected to pay 1.1 billion euros in carbon tax, according to RBC calculations. The European Commission’s proposed carbon tax will collect almost 1.1 billion euros from Russia in cross border imports of “dirty goods” in an effort to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions. “Dirty goods” include fertilizers, iron and steel make up a large part of Russia’s traded goods.
> Unprecedented fires ravage Yakutia. Recent heat waves of up to 39 degrees Celsius have sparked massive forest fires in Siberia’s vast Yakutia region, destroying 3.7 million acres of land and leaving behind thick layers of smoke in Yakutia’s cities, towns and villages.
SCIENCE
> A Russian-French research initiative studied the diets of dogs and humans as well as their relationships with ancient parasites. As a result of the analysis of ten canina coprolite samples obtained from the Neolithic Russian excavation site of Sertei II revealed several parasites, offering insights into the ways that the diet of dogs could come to mirror the diet of ancient people as well as modern humans and their environments.
> The Russian Academy of Sciences’ Arctic Center launched their search for freshwater. Using uranium isotopes, the center plans to search for freshwater in the Volga region of Russia by analyzing thawing permafrost. A connection has been found between the ratio of water’s uranium isotopes and its salinity.
BIOTECH
> Russia introduced their first cloned calf. Natalia Zinovyeva, director of the Federal Research Center for Livestock, a government-funded institute, shared details on how the introduction of animal genome cloning is a potential answer to the center’s primary task of conserving the country’s “genetic resources in a renewable form.”
[Source: Kommersant]
SOCIAL MEDIA
> Russia escalated its tech battle and levied more fines on Twitter, Facebook and Telegram for failures to remove government banned information. Facebook, Twitter and Telegram were fined $81,320, $74,409 and $108,251 respectively. Russia has repeatedly gone after social media platforms used to organize protests for opposition leader Alex Navalny, and the phone number of Pavel Durov, CEO of chat platform Telegram, was recently found on a list of contacts suspected of being surveillance targets.
> Telegram launched several AI-generated channels. Marketologist Alexander Sysoev bought out a share of Telegram’s “42 seconds Project” and launched a closed channel, in which news will be written by a unique algorithm that issues user-specific invitations. The AI-created content will highlight the “main thing,” with users estimated to spend no more than 42 seconds reading each post.
[Source: Kommersant]
> Former WhatsApp employees launched social network HalloApp, where you can add friends through a phone number alone. HalloApp does not save user data and encrypts all chats, and has been available for Android and iOS users beginning July 19. Founders Neeraj Arora and Michael Donohue left WhatsApp in 2018, with Arora describing HalloApp as “the antidote to traditional social media.”
[Source: vc.ru]
E-COMMERCE
> Ukraine issued sanctions against Russian online retail giant Wildberries. Founder and Russia’s richest self-made entrepreneur Tatiana Bakalchuk was also sanctioned as well as her husband. The measures concern the company’s divisions in Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Armenia, Belarus, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan.
SPACE TECH
> Russia launches new science lab to the International Space Station (ISS). Russian Pirs module, which has functioned in space for almost two decades, undocked on July 26 to make way for the new Nauka module, whose docking is planned for July 29. The Nauka module, which means science in Russian, is the first addition to Russia’s ISS segment in almost a decade, and was designed with the primary concern of expanding research.
> MAKS-2021 hosted the first Russian aircraft with an electric motor. The aircraft and arms show included the first test flight of the Yak-40LL laboratory aircraft, including its hybrid power plant engine and superconducting electric motor. Tests of the hybrid engine aircraft began in February 2021.
GADGETS
> Russian company Inoi created a long-lasting battery phone for outdoor enthusiasts. Called the Inoi 286z, the push button phone is equipped with an external battery, up to 16GB in storage, an audio jack and FM radio, among other things. The featured 5000 mAH battery allows one to use the phone as a battery for other devices.
INTERNET OF THINGS
> Tele2 has created the Smart Parking device for automatic parking payment in Moscow. The device is almost entirely automatic, equipped with a Tele2 sim card, and employs artificial intelligence to detect when a car has parked in a paid municipal parking lot, enabling payment and detecting when the car has left the lot.
DEALS
> Drilling tech is gaining momentum: following last week’s fund raising by horizontal drilling company Axel, this week Perfobore (Перфобур), a company that has developed technology for radial drilling, raised $9m from Runtech Ventures, Phystech Ventures (which had also invested in Axel), and private investors.
> Social media and messenger content publishing platform Postoplan raised $1.5m, led by TMT Investments as well as the founders of Bolt, Estonia’s ride-hailing unicorn. The round valued the Estonia-based company at €20m, Vedomosti reports citing TMT.
[Source: Vedomosti]
> Mesh, a California-based performance management platform for a “new-age workforce” that helps employers and employees keep track of their goals, raised $5m led by Surge, Sequoia Capital India’s accelerator program. RTP Global participated in the round.
[Source: Tech in Asia]
> Moscow-based GetCourse, a full-service platform for educational content creators (analogous to Kajabi in the US), raised $50m from Winter Capital Partners, Baring Vostok and Goldman Sachs.More than 20,000 schools, trainers and bloggers use the service to create and manage their online business. The platform allows users to create and market pre-recorded or live content, and it also offers them built-in CRM and analytics tools.
> BestDoctor, an online health insurance and tele-medicine platform, closed a $26m Series B round led by Winter Capital Partners, alongside VNV Global, previously known as Vostok New Ventures, and the corporate VC arm of Austrian insurance group UNIQA, based on a $90m valuation.
BestDoctor’s product is currently offered as an enterprise platform for private companies, but it plans to enter the consumer market, as well as to expand into European markets.
> Postoplan, an Estonian social marketing startup launched in 2019 by Alexey Bozhin, Katerina Sukhenko and Dmitry Kann, raised $1.5m from TMT Investments as well as the founders of Bolt, Estonia’s ride-hailing ‘unicorn’. The transaction values the company at €20m according to Vedomosti.
> Vochi, a Belarusian startup which has developed a video editing app with 500,000 users, raised $2.4m from investors including Russia’s Angelsdeck and Alexei Solovyov's A.Partners.
[Rusven]
> In public markets, European Medical Center (EMC), which runs 12 upscale hospitals and clinics in Moscow, completed an IPO on the Moscow Stock Exchange and is now valued over $1bn. The company pointed to the “mediocre level of public healthcare services” in Russia, which has been exposed by the pandemic, as boosting demand for private treatment. EMC’s revenue jumped 20% to €241m in 2020.
The deal netted the firm’s owners — including Roman Abramovich — almost $500m in proceeds. Controlling shareholder Igor Shilov reduced his ownership from 71% to 55%, receiving $180m in the deal and becoming Russia’s newest billionaire.
[Moscow Times], [Bloomberg]