Botify, provider of search engine optimization tools and apps, today announced that it raised $55 million, bringing its total raised to date to $82 million. CEO Adrien Menard says that the funding — a series C, led by InfraVia Growth with participation from Bpifrance, Eurazeo, and Ventech — will enable the company to grow its platform, develop its partner ecosystem, and expand its global footprint as it focuses on product R&D.

With an increasing number of businesses shifting to online as their primary channel, ensuring high placement in web searches has become a priority. There are 80,000 searches done per second, driving 53% of web traffic today. But it’s a moving target. Google alone made 4,500 algorithm updates and changes last year to Google Search.

New York-based Botify provides a platform to discover and fix problems with the aim of making sites more discoverable by search engines. Working with major search engines and internet infrastructure companies to ensure compliance with guidelines, the company develops and maintains AI-enabled analytics and automation tools that leverage more than 1,000 metrics to understand a website’s content, search engines’ behaviors, and users’ intent.

Botify was founded by Menard, Thomas Grange, and Stan Chauvin, who previously worked together at a digital marketing agency. As Menard explained, the trio came to the conclusion that companies were focusing too much time optimizing content and keywords without knowing if Google and other search engines were even crawling their webpages.

“Almost half of the pages of large, enterprise websites are not crawled by Google. When a page is not crawled or seen by Google, it will never rank in search engines, and therefore cannot drive traffic or revenue,” Menard told VentureBeat via email. “This is how Botify was born — some of [our] first customers included eBay, BlaBlaCar, and Expedia in France. [We] entered the U.S. market in 2016. Fast-forward to today, and the U.S. now accounts for more than 60% of [our] revenue.”

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Synaptics pioneered sensors for touchscreens for PCs and mobile devices. But the San Jose-based hardware company has shifted to where the processing is happening — at the edge of the network.

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Today during its Labs Day expo, Intel shared an update on progress within the Intel Neuromorphic Research Community (INRC), the ecosystem of over 100 academic groups, government labs, research institutions, and companies founded in 2018 to further neuromorphic computing. Intel and the INRC claim to have achieved breakthroughs in applying neuromorphic hardware to a range of applications, from gesture and voice recognition to autonomous drone navigation.

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Probably the most constant reminder of the lingering effects of COVID-19 is our daily work routine. For most of us who are either not allowed to return to the office or choose not to, each day is a quest to work productively in our home environment while ignoring the unavoidable household distractions. Technology has helped us adjust to our new reality, and many surveys have shown that employees believe they are as productive, if not more so, working from home, and in fact prefer the WFH model.

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Prophesee announced it has closed a $28 million round of venture capital as it seeks to accelerate the rollout of its machine vision sensors.

The Paris-based company’s technology is designed to mimic functions of the human eye, a dynamic it refers to as “neuromorphic.” The tech was initially targeted at Industry 4.0 applications like predictive maintenance, but Prophesee plans to push beyond that market to begin targeting automotive, VR/AR, internet of things (IoT), and other sectors.

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