Microsoft Ventures, the corporate venture capital arm of software provider Microsoft, invested in US-based machine intelligence software developer CognitiveScale yesterday, increasing the size of its series B round to more than $25m.
The capital has been added to the $21.8m supplied for CognitiveScale by Intel Capital, the corporate venturing subsidiary of semiconductor technology producer Intel, computing firm IBM and venture capital firm Norwest Venture Partners (NVP) in August this year.
CognitiveScale produces software that helps companies use big data to enhance employee and customer engagement. Its tools are accessed through a hybrid cognitive cloud foundation that can be scaled on IBM, Amazon and Microsoft cloud infrastructures.
Microsoft made its investment in CognitiveScale in conjunction with the development of artificial intelligence tools on its HoloLens mixed reality development platform and Azure cloud computing product.
Nagraj Kashyap, corporate vice president of Microsoft Ventures, said: “With our investment, we aim to propel the development of new mixed reality experiences enabled by cognitive computing – CognitiveScale’s products and team of experts are great partners to bring new offerings to market.”
CognitiveScale was founded in 2013 and came out of stealth the following year, but has not disclosed any earlier funding.