Tag Archive for: AI startups

One-Year-Old AI Startup Secures Over 60 Million From Investors!

Cybersyn, an AI startup that is only one year out from its launch, has announced it has received a $62.9 million influx of capital from some of the most well-known investors in the world.

Cybersyn, a data startup founded in 2022 by Alex Izydorczyk, recently announced that it raised multi-million in capital from Snowflake Inc., Coatue Management, and Sequoia Capital.

According to a press release announcing the huge influx of cash, Cybersyn is “a company that sells proprietary economic datasets to investors, government agencies, and corporate clients.”

Cybersyn plans to use the funding to expand its small team — it has eight employees — and acquire additional proprietary data for expanded growth. In an interview with Reuters, Izydorczyk touched on the future of the company.

“We’re not trying to just be a data broker,” he said. “We’re trying to actually add value to the data we acquire and combine it.”

Among the big-name investors in the data space is Snowflake Inc., a publicly traded company and provider of cloud-based data warehousing solutions. It provides services such as data warehouse modernization, data exchange, and engineering and data science.

Christian Kleinerman, senior vice president of products at Snowflake, added the following:

“Cybersyn is a company that was built for this era of data sharing and moving with agility. We think of the marketplace as a core part of our offering. If someone is willing to be strategically aligned with us, we’re happy to invest.”

To date, Cybersyn has released both free and paid data sets on the Snowflake Marketplace. These data sets have potential buyers across various industries ranging from consumer goods to pharmaceuticals.

What Does the Scale of This Investment Mean for AI Startups?

Data has been described as “digital gold.” Some of the largest brands in the world, like Apple Inc., Meta Platforms Inc., and Amazon.com, Inc., all make much of their billions in the trillion-dollar data market. Amazon’s cloud storage does billions in revenue per year, supporting some of the largest companies in the world, and Meta has an advertising empire at their fingertips. This is likely why these AI startups like Cybersyn, whose solution traffic in Big Data, are having little trouble securing tens of millions despite being relatively new companies.

How BigRio Helps Bring Investors to AI Startups

There is no shortage of innovative young AI startups such as Cybersyn out there. Often the challenge is getting investors to see their potential and get them the capital they need to take their AI and data solutions to the next level.

BigRio prides itself on being a facilitator and incubator for such advances in leveraging AI to improve the digital world.

In fact, we like to think of ourselves as a “Shark Tank for AI.”

If you are familiar with the TV series, then you know that, basically, what they do is hyper-accelerate the most important part of the incubation process – visibility. You can’t get better visibility than getting out in front of celebrity investors and a TV audience of millions of viewers. Many entrepreneurs who have appeared on that program – even those who did not get picked up by the Sharks – succeeded because others who were interested in their concepts saw them on the show.

At BigRio, we may not have a TV audience, but we can do the same. We have the expertise to not only weed out the companies that are not ready for the market, as the sharks on the TV show do, but also mentor and get those that we feel are readily noticed by the right people in the AI investment community.

You can read much more about how AI is redefining Big Data in my new book Quantum Care: A Deep Dive into AI for Health Delivery and Research. While the book’s primary focus is on healthcare delivery, it also takes a deep dive into AI in general, with specific chapters on the marriage of AI and data technologies.

Rohit Mahajan is a Managing Partner with BigRio. He has particular expertise in the development and design of innovative solutions for clients in Healthcare, Financial Services, Retail, Automotive, Manufacturing, and other industry segments.

BigRio is a technology consulting firm empowering data to drive innovation and advanced AI. We specialize in cutting-edge Big Data, Machine Learning, and Custom Software strategy, analysis, architecture, and implementation solutions. If you would like to benefit from our expertise in these areas or if you have further questions on the content of this article, please do not hesitate to contact us.

Artificial Intelligence Moves Heavily Into the NFT Space!

Investors take note, machine learning is beginning to have a powerful impact on generative art non-fungible tokens (NFTs).

NFTs are cryptographic assets on a blockchain with unique identification codes and metadata that distinguish them from each other. Most often, NFTs are used to represent real-world items like artwork and real estate. “Tokenizing” these real-world tangible assets makes buying, selling, and trading them more efficient while reducing the probability of fraud.

With that in mind, AI is becoming increasingly important in the non-fungible token space. “Generative art” – art that has been created by AI — has quickly emerged as one of the main categories of the NFT market, driving innovative projects and investment in astonishing collections. From the works of AI art legends such as Refik Anadol or Sofia Crespo to Tyler Hobbs’s new QQL project, NFTs have become one of the main vehicles to access AI-powered art.

The rise of generative AI has come as a surprise even to many of the early AI pioneers, who mostly saw this discipline as a relatively obscure area of machine learning. Its leap to dominance in the NFT market has largely been driven by gains in computational power and next-gen MI algorithms that can help models learn without requiring a lot of labeled datasets, which are incredibly limited and expensive to build.

One of the most significant of these advances has been “text to image” (TTI). AI-driven TTI programs such as DALL-E and GLIDE allow users to describe in text what they would like the program to render, and it then creates an interpretive image based on the text, with some profoundly remarkable results. Thus making TTI ideal for the creation of unique and marketable NFTs.

There are also similar generative art solutions such as “text-to-video” or “image-to-image,” but TTI, by far, is having the greatest impact on the NFT market because a disproportionate percentage of digital art collectibles are represented as static images.

Throughout the history of technology, there have been many examples of seemingly disparate trends coming together to form a market symbiosis that benefits both. The most recent example is the social-mobile-cloud revolution, in which each one of those trends expanded the market of the other two.

Generative AI and NFTs are starting to exhibit a similar dynamic. Both trends have been able to bring complex technology to mainstream culture. NFTs complement generative AI with digital ownership and distribution models that would be nearly impossible to implement otherwise. Similarly, generative AI is likely to become one of the most important sources of NFT creation now and into the future.

How BigRio Helps Facilitate Investment in AI Startups

Like what is occurring with NFT and AI-generated art, BigRio looks for and helps to facilitate such market symbiosis.

We like to think of ourselves as a “Shark Tank for AI.”

If you are familiar with the TV series, then you know that, basically, what they do is hyper-accelerate the most important part of the incubation process – visibility. You can’t get better visibility than getting in front of celebrity investors and a TV audience of millions of viewers. Many entrepreneurs who have appeared on that program – even those who did not get picked up by the sharks – succeeded because others who were interested in their concepts saw them on the show.

At BigRio, we may not have a TV audience, but we can do the same. We have the contacts and the expertise to not only weed out the companies that are not ready, as the sharks on the TV show do but also mentor and get those that we feel are readily noticed by the right people in the growing AI investment community.

Because we see so many potential AI innovators, we are also ideally suited to create the kind of synergy between concepts and applications such as is occurring with AI, ML and NFTs.

Rohit Mahajan is a Managing Partner with BigRio. He has a particular expertise in the development and design of innovative solutions for clients in Healthcare, Financial Services, Retail, Automotive, Manufacturing, and other industry segments.

BigRio is a technology consulting firm empowering data to drive innovation, and advanced AI. We specialize in cutting-edge Big Data, Machine Learning, and Custom Software strategy, analysis, architecture, and implementation solutions. If you would like to benefit from our expertise in these areas or if you have further questions on the content of this article, please do not hesitate to contact us.

 

IT Experts Predict The Top Five Advances in AI for 2023!

AI is known for its ability to make very accurate predictions. But often, human prognosticators are pretty good at it too! In this article, we take a look at what leading IT experts say they think will be the top five advances in AI and machine learning in 2023, as compiled by The Enterprisers Project.

1. There Will Be Continue Advancement of AI Applications in Healthcare

“AI will yield tremendous breakthroughs in treating medical conditions in the next few years. Just look at the 2021 Breakthrough Prize winner Dr. David Baker. Dr. Baker used AI to design completely new proteins. This ground-breaking technology will continue having huge ramifications in the life sciences, potentially developing life-saving medical treatments for diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.” — Michael Armstrong, Chief Technology Officer, Authenticx.

2. Continued Merging of AI and Quantum Computing

Phil Tee, Co-founder, and CEO, of Moogsoft, says to, “Watch the crossover from fundamental physics into informatics in the guise of quantum and quantum-inspired computing. While I’m not holding my breath for a practical quantum computer, we will see crossover. The mix of advanced mathematics and informatics will unleash a new generation of engineers uniquely placed to exploit the AI wave.”

3. AI Will Not Replace Humans

Despite dozens of sci-fi movies and novels to the contrary, the experts do not believe that AI will replace humans in 2023 and the years ahead, but instead, they expect to see increased interaction between human and artificial intelligence with an increased synergy between the two. “While there will be growing adoption of AI to enhance our collective user experience at scale, it will be balanced with appropriate human intervention. Humans applying the insights provided by AI will be a more effective combination overall than either one doing it alone. How and where this balance is struck will vary depending on the industry and the criticality of the function being performed. For example, radiologists assisted by an AI screen for breast cancer more successfully than they do when they work alone, according to new research. That same AI also produces more accurate results in the hands of a radiologist than it does when operating solo.” – E.G. Nadhan, Global Chief Architect Leader, Red Hat

4. A Move Towards More Ethical AI and an AI Bill of Rights

As we reported earlier this year, the Biden administration had launched a proposed “AI Bill of Rights” to help ensure the ethical use of AI. Not surprisingly, it is modeled after the sort of patient “bills of rights” people have come to expect as they interact with doctors, hospitals, and other healthcare professionals.
David Talby, CTO of John Snow Labs, says to see continued movement in this direction. “We can expect to see a few major AI trends in 2023, and two to watch are responsible AI and generative AI. Responsible or ethical AI has been a hot-button topic for some time, but we’ll see it move from concept to practice next year. Smarter technology and emerging legal frameworks around AI are also steps in the right direction. The AI Act, for example, is a proposed, first-of-its-kind European law set forth to govern the risk of AI use cases. Similar to GDPR for data usage, The AI Act could become a baseline standard for responsible AI and aims to become law next Spring. This will have an impact on companies using AI worldwide.”

5. AI Will Support Increased and “Smarter” Automation

“Everyone understands the value of automation, and, in our software-defined world, almost everything can be automated. The decision point or trigger for the automation, however, is still one of the trickier elements. This is where AI will increasingly come in: AI can make more intelligent, less brittle decisions than automation’s traditional ‘if-this-then-that’ rules.” – Richard Whitehead, CTO, and Chief Evangelist, Moogsoft.

How BigRio Helps Facilitate the Future of AI

At BigRio, we not only agree with these experts on these top five advances in AI that will likely occur in 2023, but we are also actively trying to facilitate them!
We like to think of ourselves as a “Shark Tank for AI.”

If you are familiar with the TV series, then you know that, basically, what they do is hyper-accelerate the most important part of the incubation process – visibility. You can’t get better visibility than getting in front of celebrity investors and a TV audience of millions of viewers. Many entrepreneurs who have appeared on that program – even those who did not get picked up by the sharks – succeeded because others who were interested in their concepts saw them on the show.

At BigRio, we may not have a TV audience, but we can do the same. We have the contacts and the expertise to not only weed out the companies that are not ready, as the sharks on the TV show do but also mentor and get those that we feel are readily noticed by the right people in the growing AI investment community.

Rohit Mahajan is a Managing Partner with BigRio. He has a particular expertise in the development and design of innovative solutions for clients in Healthcare, Financial Services, Retail, Automotive, Manufacturing, and other industry segments.

BigRio is a technology consulting firm empowering data to drive innovation, and advanced AI. We specialize in cutting-edge Big Data, Machine Learning, and Custom Software strategy, analysis, architecture, and implementation solutions. If you would like to benefit from our expertise in these areas or if you have further questions on the content of this article, please do not hesitate to contact us.

The Enterprisers Project is a community and online publication helping CIOs and IT leaders solve problems and drive business value. The Enterprisers Project, supported by Red Hat, also partners with Harvard Business Review.

Six Impressive AI Startups Are All Based in Austria!

Some of the most innovative advances in AI are not taking place in the US; there are some powerful incubators all through Europe and places such as Israel. In fact, six of the most impressive new AI startups are all based in Austria!

Those that follow the IT industry have long pointed out that Austria has been the up-and-coming “Silicon Valley” of Europe, attracting very high-caliber talent and enabling some impressive AI startups. Here are six quite noteworthy AI startups that are located in Austria.

1. Adverity
Adverity, founded in 2015, assesses and visualizes expenses, performance, and returns. The program integrates campaign data from hundreds of data sources, including LinkedIn, Google Ads, and Facebook, before sending the findings to business management systems via native connectors. According to Marktechpost, the California-based AI news hub, the platform is used by well-known companies like Red Bull, IKEA, and Zurich Insurance and is accessible to agencies, brands, and e-commerce providers.

2. Robart
Also established in Austria, Robart provides full AI navigation solutions for mobile robots, including hardware, software, and connected IoT applications such as your robotic vacuum and similar devices. Using Robart’s solutions, robots can map a whole home, categorize it into rooms, design particular cleaning procedures, identify deviations like an open window, learn user patterns, and adjust to changes in user habits.

3. Cortical.io
Cortical.io provides free access to rudimentary tools like term disambiguation, text comparison, and keyword extraction on its website. The developers claim that such tools can reduce the time-consuming task of reviewing complex documents such as legal contracts by as much as 80%.

4. Medicus AI
Medicus AI created a medical app that explains and analyzes blood tests and medical reports and gives customers individualized healthcare recommendations in line with its results. Like Adverity the company was also founded in Austria in 2015. Medicus AI supports hospitals, diagnostic labs, and other healthcare facilities by improving interactions with patients by providing simple-to-understand health reports, guiding patients through disease treatment and prevention, as well as providing remote monitoring of patient behavior to ensure compliance and enhance long-term health outcomes.

5. Semanticlabs
Austria-based Semanticlabs creates tools for large-scale data analyses, such as semantic algorithms. The company has developed out-of-the-box solutions for collaborative document management, automated tagging, and topic extraction from text using techniques for natural language processing. According to Marktechpost, their customers include Kronen Zeitung, the largest newspaper in Austria, and Erste Group, one of the largest financial service providers in Central and Eastern Europe.

6. Scarlet red
Scarletred is another AI healthcare solution designed to improve diagnostics, in this case, for the remote detection of various skin disorders. The company was founded in 2014. The platform comprises a web tool for picture processing, an iOS app, and a skin patch that calibrates photographs for different light and distance situations. Patients upload a photo of the region being examined and their skin tag to their healthcare provider’s online portal using the iOS app. The automated skin area analysis is then performed by the web-based analytical platform using computer vision.

How BigRio Helps Facilitate Investment in AI Startups
Like the agencies and investors who are helping places like Austria become hubs of AI innovation, BigRio is also a powerful facilitator and incubator for AI startups in the US and around the world. We specialize in bringing healthcare AI solutions such as Medicus AI and Scarletred mentioned above to market.

We like to think of ourselves as a “Shark Tank for AI.”

If you are familiar with the TV series, then you know that, basically, what they do is hyper-accelerate the most important part of the incubation process – visibility. You can’t get better visibility than getting in front of celebrity investors and a TV audience of millions of viewers. Many entrepreneurs who have appeared on that program – even those who did not get picked up by the sharks – succeeded because others who were interested in their concepts saw them on the show.

At BigRio, we may not have a TV audience, but we can do the same. We have the contacts and the expertise to not only weed out the companies that are not ready, as the sharks on the TV show do but also mentor and get those that we feel are readily noticed by the right people who have a vested interest in advancing AI and Machine learning technologies.

Rohit Mahajan is a Managing Partner with BigRio. He has a particular expertise in the development and design of innovative solutions for clients in Healthcare, Financial Services, Retail, Automotive, Manufacturing, and other industry segments.

BigRio is a technology consulting firm empowering data to drive innovation, and advanced AI. We specialize in cutting-edge Big Data, Machine Learning, and Custom Software strategy, analysis, architecture, and implementation solutions. If you would like to benefit from our expertise in these areas or if you have further questions on the content of this article, please do not hesitate to contact us.