What do Coca-Cola, Walmart, Google, Allstate, and Visa have in common? They all generate enough $$ to finance a swimming pool of money, yes. But they’re also all clients of Fractal AI.

The 21-year-old AI company became a unicorn just last week, after its latest $360 million funding round led to a reported valuation of $1+ billion. Emerging Tech Brew chatted with CEO Pranay Agrawal about plans for the funding, the company’s pivot, and AI ethics.

The business of models

In many ways, you can think of Fractal as an AI “fixer.”

The Mumbai– and New York–based company is made up of about 3,500 employees worldwide—mostly data scientists, data engineers, and design consultants—and it makes money by helping companies solve their problems using AI and analytics.

• Fractal works with one in five Fortune 500 companies, according to Agrawal, and no matter the sector—like retail, tech, or financial services—Fractal aims to develop algorithms using structured and unstructured data.

Besides Fractal AI, the company’s other arm is Fractal Ventures, an idea incubator. When a company hires Fractal to solve a problem, and it sees a hole in the market, Fractal comes up with its own product or business to fill that gap. Then it raises seed funding for the startup and maintains a majority stake.

• That’s how Qure.ai, an AI startup focused on CT scans that Fractal funded, came to be. It raised $16 million in 2020.

Charting the course

So how did a company that’s old enough to drink become a newly minted unicorn?

Let’s turn back the clock to when Fractal was founded in 2000. Everyone was still listening to the Backstreet Boys’ Millennium album, low-rise jeans were all the rage, and AI was early in terms of commercial use, so Fractal dealt mostly with statistical modeling.

In 2015, Fractal decided on a company-wide pivot from static models to more dynamic AI models. That involved upskilling some of its analytics professionals, hiring AI veterans, and investing heavily in its engineering department.

• Four years ago, Fractal employed 10 or 20 engineers, Agrawal noted—now, it has 600 and plans to continue to grow the department.

The company has also instated an AI ethics team, which is currently building out sets of frameworks for other teams to create “ethics scorecards” of sorts for each product Fractal creates. Agrawal said the AI ethics team is currently made up of about a dozen people.

Looking ahead: Fractal plans to use its new funding to make some strategic acquisitions, not unlike its recent purchase of Zerogons, the owner of a ML and data science platform. It has also invested in Analytics Vidhya, an ad tech and analytics company, and Senseforth, a conversational AI company.

Click here to read the full story.—HF

Sony teased its new VR gaming initiative at CES last week, dubbed PlayStation VR2. The VR2 will function alongside the new VR2 Sense controller, creating an experience Sony likely hopes will rival that of Meta’s Oculus Quest line of headsets.

Sony might be a runner-up in the VR headset race right now, but it’s a giant in gaming, which is widely expected to be a primary use case for VR. Sony’s big bet is that its growing library and list of exclusive titles will draw customers away from Meta.

VR2 functions exclusively through the PS5, which means any potential customers will have to invest in not only VR2, but the PS5, which retails officially for anywhere between $400 and $500. The original VR headset for the PS4 was $499 at release, while the Oculus Quest 2 retails at $299.

• And that’s if they manage to buy a system in the first place. The PlayStation 5 has been in limited stock since its release in fall 2020 due to a chip shortage, fueled in part by the Covid pandemic, and has no timetable for widespread availability.

The new headset sports 4k resolution and an OLED display, as well as eye-tracking that Sony claims can register minute eye movements and head turning. It also features headset feedback, so players will feel vibrations at points in the game, like when vehicles pass by.

• The controller is outfitted with haptic feedback that responds to tension from things like pulling a trigger or drawing a bow and arrow.

So far, Sony has only showcased a teaser for Horizon Call of the Mountain, the VR accompaniment to its upcoming Horizon Forbidden West exclusive title (no relation to Meta's Horizon–branded VR apps). Sony has an expansive list of gaming IP to eventually draw from too, if it desires, like Uncharted, God of War, and Spider-Man.

Zoom out: The last metric Sony shared on PSVR was that it sold over 5 million units total back in 2020. Meanwhile Oculus’s Quest 2 headset has shipped over 10 million units, per CEO Cristiano Amon of Qualcomm, which makes the Snapdragon chips Oculus Quest 2 uses.

Click here to view this story on-site.—JM

Last week, in the spirit of reflection and prediction, we asked all of you to tell us what tech trend you expect to define this year. Here’s a selection of some of the most common answers, from the 425 of you who replied:

• Climate tech: Lots of people said climate tech in general, but even more said EVs and EV battery tech, specifically.
• Metaverse: Some of you wrote this explicitly, but a significant number wrote in about AR and/or VR specifically. We’re grouping it all together for these purposes.
• AI: The most common specific application mentioned was AI in health care, and there was some talk of “democratizing” the tech.
• Honorable mentions: Semiconductors (sometimes in tandem with the word “shortage,” sometimes not), crypto/Web3, automation.

Click here to take this week’s poll about EVs.—DM

Stat: An estimated 15% of the global bitcoin mining network went offline late last week, as mining hub Kazakhstan shut down its internet amid protests.

Quote: “We want to prioritize our ability to rapidly bring new vehicles to market versus having that path to prioritize profitability.”—Rivian CFO Claire McDonough to the WSJ

Read: What the metaverse could eventually look like, based on the current gaming world.

Essential info: KPIs help organizations measure progress, but which are the most important when it comes to tracking success? In Oracle NetSuite’s guide, you’ll learn about the 20 essential KPIs every growing business should track, and much more. Get the guide here.*

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Today–Wednesday: SpaceCom 2022, an event dedicated to the business of space, takes place. The four major themes for the conference are space exploration, space commerce, on-planet applications, and off-planet commercialization.

Wednesday: Micromobility World takes place (virtually). The event will feature panels on IoT and micromobility, battery networks for micromoblility, and how AI could transform the bike.

Sunday: NRF 2022 kicks off, and runs through next Tuesday. We’re paying attention to the annual retail industry bonanza for any new shopping tech showcased at the event. If you want more comprehensive coverage of the event, check out Retail Brew.

Despite all of the recent progress made with EVs, US consumers are still wedded to gas-powered vehicles: 69% said they’d prefer internal combustion for their next car, according to a new Deloitte report.

• Hybrids were next, with 17% of consumers selecting that option. Just 5% chose plug-in hybrid, and 5% selected battery electric.

Why the hesitation? In the US, the main issues cited are driving range (20%), lack of public EV charging infrastructure (14%), and cost (13%).

Catch up on the top Emerging Tech Brew stories from the past few editions:

• John Deere thinks its self-driving tractor can help feed the world
• A brief intro to CES 2022
• Last year, experts told us what to expect for 2021. Here’s how their predictions shook out