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Neo-Bank TBC Uzbekistan Raises $37 Million To Expand And Develop AI Products
- Written by Andrea Miliani Former Tech News Expert
- Fact-Checked by Justyn Newman Former Lead Cybersecurity Editor
TBC Bank Uzbekistan raised $37 million in a recent funding round led by the bank’s London-based parent TBC Group to expand its services and develop AI products and services.
In a Rush? Here are the Quick Facts!
- TBC Uzbekistan raised $37 million in a recent round led by its parent company TBC Group
- The neo-bank expects to provide more AI solutions and expand services like including its own insurance
- TBC Uzbekistan is the country’s largest fully digital bank but is getting ready for increasing competition
According to TechCrunch , the mobile-exclusive bank was founded in 2020 and has been offering customers the possibility to open bank accounts and process deposits and cash loans through its mobile app. For the past few months, TBC Uzbekistan has been developing its own AI solutions like AI agents to remind users of upcoming payments—the startup expects to expand to voice interactions in the near future.
“We’re going deeper into the financial life of retail customers across Uzbekistan. So we’re building out vertical by vertical into different products,” said Oliver Hughes, head of international business at TBC Group, to TechCrunch.
The new capital will boost the company’s AI efforts—even though the amount for this purpose has not been disclosed—and add to the $38.5 million the neo-bank raised in July.
TBC Uzbekistan expects to scale up by including new insurance services—the company currently relies on third-party services—expanding its purposes and areas of expertise.
The mobile bank reported 15.7 registered unique users in a report shared in June and proved increasing growth and revenues and its dominance in the market as the country’s largest digital bank with low competition.
“It’s not super competitive today, but it will certainly become more and more competitive as we could go along over the next few years,” said Hughes.
This year, other startups have been developing digital banking solutions for their markets and aim to expand to more regions. The Mexican fintech Stori raised $212 million in August to expand its services, and the African fintech Juicyway recently processed more than $1 billion in transactions powered by stablecoin technology.
Photo by Ian Usher on Unsplash
Ukraine Collects 2 Million Hours of Battlefield Footage To Train AI For Military Purposes
- Written by Andrea Miliani Former Tech News Expert
- Fact-Checked by Justyn Newman Former Lead Cybersecurity Editor
Ukraine gathered a large database of around 2 million hours of battlefield footage from over 15,000 drone crews since Russia’s invasion in 2022.
In a Rush? Here are the Quick Facts!
- Ukrainian organization gathered 2 million hours of battlefield footage from over 15,000 drones
- The database is expected to be used to train AI-powered systems to improve military strategies
- Russia and Ukraine have been using AI during the war since 2022
According to Reuters , the footage gathered—equivalent to 228 years of video—includes content from Russia and Ukraine’s frontiers and can be used to train AI models for military purposes.
“This is food for the AI: If you want to teach an AI, you give it 2 million hours (of video), it will become something supernatural,” said Oleksandr Dmitriev, founder of the non-profit digital system OCHI, to Reuters.
Dmitriev explained that the footage could be used to improve combat tactics and optimize weapons’s performance with AI-powered systems.
The use of artificial intelligence for military tactics is not new. Both Russia and Ukraine have used this technology during their conflict to scan images and identify targets more effectively than a human could, or to fly to certain regions without human piloting.
After realizing that the drones deployed in 2022 could provide valuable information for AI training, Dmitriev’s team has been gathering around 5 terabytes of new data daily.
The Ukrainian government also has another system called Avengers which collects and processes its own data. The Ministry of Defense revealed that with this AI-powered tool, they have been able to identify 12,000 Russian targets.
Experts agree that the large battlefield footage could be very powerful depending on the quality of the images, but Dmitriev didn’t disclose more details.
The use of AI for military purposes has been increasing in multiple regions of the world. A few weeks ago it was revealed that Chinese researchers have been using Meta’s AI model Llama to develop military systems, and Google Deepmind workers have expressed concerns over Google’s contracts with military organizations .
