For many startups, fundraising is a long and arduous process, with more obstacles that foreseen, and with disappointing results. But for web dev analytics startup Keen IO, this round was the opposite.

Summer is flying by – Gartner has already trimmed its annual projections for worldwide information technology spending.

Why this keeps happening, however, is a story of something very particular: In the current tech transition, analysts are scrambling to figure out how money and technology need now work together.

In Silicon Valley, deep learning ranks as one of the hottest technologies. Now, this startup sees a chance to let lots of developers incorporate deep learning into their apps.

Deep learning essentially drives computers to make inferences like human brains do, based on the consideration of lots of information. It can be used to identify patterns and other traits in images, music, and text.

A startup called Ersatz Labs wants to help lots of companies intelligently answer lots of questions after reviewing lots of data, just as big tech companies like Google and Netflix do.

Toward that end, today Ersatz is launching a cloud service for deep learning, as well as a hardware-software package to run inside companies’ existing facilities. While deep learning services are often geared toward specific uses, like text processing and image recognition, Ersatz makes deep learning available for any type of use.

Do you know what your true skin tone and undertone are? What about how your skin has changed over time? Beautiful Me is a new mobile app that applies big data and a deep neural network to make your skin profile only several taps away. This app was created by ModiFace, the company behind the Sephora 3D Augmented Reality mirror.

Beautiful Me can auto-download up to 500 of your Facebook photos, and it chooses 100 high-quality photos out of them for analyzing. Based on these 100 photos, the app picks up skin pixels from eyes and lips.

Rhys Fureigh, Molly McLeod, and Dan Getelman are the three Code for America 2014 fellows working on the Long Beach project. Fureigh is a web developer. McLeod is a graphic designer. Getelman was the co-founder and chief technology officer of Founders Fund-backed education startup Lore, which Noodle Education acquired last year.

Big data meets small business?

Two years ago almost to the day, ThriveHive closed a $1.5 million seed round. Now the company’s everything-in-a-box small business marketing solution is ready to go. Briefly, the company claims it’s everything you need to market your small business, connected, integrated … and powered by the collective wisdom of hundreds of similar businesses.

Dropbox has been acquiring companies to help it expand the services that it can offer to consumers and enterprises beyond cloud storage. But the company — which has raised $1.1 billion and is among the larger tech startups tipped for an IPO – is also making strategic acquisitions to help keep its own house in order.