"The company behind Viv, a powerful form of AI built by Siri’s creators which is able to learn from the world to improve upon its capabilities, has just closed on $12.5 million in Series B funding. Multiple sources close to the matter confirm the round, which was oversubscribed and values the company at north of nine figures. The funding was led by Iconiq Capital, the so-called “Silicon Valley billionaires club” that operates a cross between a family office and venture capital firm." - Sean McBride

"While Iconiq may not be a household name, a Forbes investigation into its client list revealed people like Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Dustin Moskovitz and Sheryl Sandberg, Twitter’s Jack Dorsey, LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman and other big names were on its roster. In addition to Iconiq, Li Ka-shing’s Horizons Ventures and Pritzker Group VC also participated along with several private individuals. This new round follows the company’s $10 million Series A from Horizons, bringing the total funding to date to $22.5 million." - Sean McBride

"Viv is different. It can parse natural language and complex queries, linking different third-party sources of information together in order to answer the query at hand. And it does so quickly, and in a way that will make it an ideal user interface for the coming Internet of Things — that is, the networked, everyday objects that we’ll interact with using voice commands. A Wired article about Viv and its creators described the system as one that will be “taught by the world, know more than it was taught and it will learn something new everyday.”" - Sean McBride

"While to some extent, Viv is the next iteration of Siri in terms of this vision of connecting people to a world of knowledge that’s accessed via voice commands, in many ways it’s very different. It’s potentially much more powerful than other intelligent assistants accessed by voice, including not only Sir, but also Google Now, Microsoft’s Cortana or Amazon’s Alexa. Unlike Siri, the system is not static. Viv will have memory. “It will understand its users in the aggregate, with respect to their language, their behavior, and their intent,” explains Morgenthaler. But it will also understand you and your own behavior and preferences, he says. “It will adjust its weighting and probabilities so it gets things right more often. So it will learn from its experiences in that regard,” he says." - Sean McBride

"But Viv Labs is not alone in pursing its goal. Google bought AI startup DeepMind for over half a billion, has since gone on to aqui-hire more AI teams and, as Wired noted, has also hired AI legends Geoffrey Hinton and Ray Kurzweil to join its company." - Sean McBride