March Buzz, News – HSBC, Meta Layoffs, Robotics

• HSBC to buy SVB subsidiary in the UK

After Silicon Valley Bank collapse, UK Treasury and the Bank of England have “initiated the sale″ of Silicon Valley Bank UK. HSBC being the front runner. Officials have been chalking a plan to find a buyer for the UK Subsidiary after failure of California based bank. After working on it, government has finally facilitated sale of SVB UK to HSBC.

• Meta to axe another 10,000 employees

Meta (Facebook) has announced on Tuesday, that it will shed another 10,000 employees in a fresh round of job cuts. Also, it will not fill 5,000 open positions as the social media pioneer cuts costs.

It is a another blow to the employees after it has axed 11,000 jobs in November, which was 13 per cent of its workforce at the time. According to sources, company’s falling profits and 3rd consecutive quarter of declining revenue is the primary reason behind it.

• Airobotics acquires Iron Drone Assets

Airobotics, subsidiary of Ondas Holdings acquires Iron Drone Assets last week. Iron Drone is a specialist in autonomous counter-drone systems. Airbiotics will integrate Iron Drone’s counter-drone technology with its Ondas Autonomous Systems business unit.

• John Deere acquires SparkAI

SparkAI, a New York-based startup has acquired by John Deere. SparkAI develops human-in-the-loop technology to help robots resolve edge cases in real-time. John Deere, has been developing autonomous tractors. Earlier John Deere was a SparkAI customer for a few years prior to the acquisition. The financial terms of the deal are not disclosed.

• Mendix and AWS Deepen Ties to Optimize Low-Code Platform

Low-code application platform (LCAP) provider Mendix and Amazon Web Services (AWS) deepen their ties to optimize low code to support composable enterprise strategies. Through this deeper partnership, Mendix and AWS accelerate the pace of innovation and upgrade platform for more efficient results.

• Plus One Robotics Raises $50 Million for its Parcel Robotics

Provider of advanced AI vision software and solutions for robotic parcel handling “Plus One Robotics“, announced that it has raised $50M in Series C funding for its Parcel Robotics vision Systems. Scale Venture Partners led this round. Plus One performs over one million parcel picks each day in production and with new funding, it further increases its capacity and scale its deployment in North America and all over the globe.