Newsletter: AI investment activity, a platform perspective. #2

This newsletter covers weekly artificial intelligence (AI) investment activity that fits four broad themes, namely: industry 4.0, entertainment sector, infrastructural software, and healthcare. For a more detailed description of these themes, please go to the first newsletter.

The primary goal of the newsletter is to explore how AI startups are integrated into value/supply chains, and what kinds of platforms may be built around these startups.

The newsletter covers the US, Canada, Europe and Israel. It’s stage agnostic and covers startups from inception through growth stages.

If you want to skip my analysis and jump to data, go to the end of the note to find a table and a link on a spreadsheet with data on featured companies.

24.09.2018–30.09.2018

Key themes

• AI goes big in healthcare, 9 out of 27 startups that were funded this week work in this industry. AI helps to consumerise healthcare. Whether it is done via a symptom checker (MEDoctor) or a very consumer-looking medical device (Butterfly Network’s $2K portable ultrasound, raised $250M) the impact will probably be significant. Just look at how sexy this medical device is (Pic. 1);

Picture 1. Butterfly iQ personal ultrasound device

• Ubiquitous surveillance — five startups work on unlocking new data streams and making surveillance near absolute, from the space, in the sea, during public events, etc. For example: Capella Space uses Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), imaging technique with an advantage of being able to see through the clouds. ASV develops unmanned marine surface vehicles;
• Machine learning routine is, in some sense, shaped by available tools. Now AI returns the favour and starts to affect these software tools and practices. Look at containerisation that is used during both stages of ML routine, now it is improved via smart AI-powered DevOps tools like Instana ($30M round) and Magalix.

Tech platforms

From last week’s fundraising data, at least 15 companies may be identified as tech platforms. They are associated with data collection, development and coordination of autonomous fleets, and ML models. Among others are:

• Data platforms: Edge Intelligence offers to distribute and federate analytics at the edge, Instead of shipping data centrally. Proscia offers telepathology features that ‘facilitate collaboration between individuals, within an institution and between partner organizations’ and allows pathologists to easily access data. NetraDyne crowdsources data on a road network, e.g. ‘…finds the distribution of crowd-sourced stop locations (red traffic lights)’;
• Hardware and software platforms for autonomous vehicles: ASV develops unmanned marine surface vehicles that may carry various payloads and offers a mission planning software, while BlueBotics offers a platform for mission management, that focuses on vehicles developed by third parties;
• Machine learning platforms like White Marsh Forests and TwentyBn offer pre-trained models and sometimes data.

Business platforms

Featured AI startups suggest several interesting examples of ways how to connect various elements of a value/supply chain and build platforms, including:

• NetraDyne not only sells a safety video system for drivers, but reuses data that was collected via this system and shares it with self-driving cars developers. Data also lies in the centre of TwentyBn, that uses it to pre-train models offered to customers ‘out of the box’ and also provides it as a separate service;
• Concirrus connects brokers, insurers and their customers. By sharing data, customers become able to receive a targeted coverage that ‘…reflects what a vessel is doing at any given point in time’ and, in a case of car insurance, to receive a feedback on their driving style;
• BlocPower builds one of the most complex platforms I’ve seen. According to its founder, it ‘… connects physical world with digital world, creates a new perspective over buildings. Buildings now are a static chunk of steel and concrete, as we think, with IoT and sensor data we make them more like a living things. When we have data, there is a new perspective around this physical assets’. BlockPower surveyed hundreds of building and simulated energy consumption of New York. That enabled owners of buildings to benchmark their energy consumption and identify ways to decrease it. Insights on energy consumption enable new types of financing for clean energy projects (see Chart 1).

More examples on creating tech and business platforms as well as data on featured startups are below in the Chart 2.

Chart 1. BlocPower platform description

Chart 2. AI companies that disclosed funding during the week 24.09.2018–30.09.2018, $M

Data is here (Google spreadsheet)

All data is from open sources and all conclusions/ideas/analysis are built only on publicly available information. For data sources see google spreadsheet.

* A company is positioned across a value chain if it has distinctive offers for several its elements. If I misunderstood the value proposition of your startup, please do let me know.

** A company is defined as a platform in tech sense if someone can build up on it. I identify a comapny as a tech platform purely based on public sources, so if I misunderstood your startup, please do let me know.

This newsletter does not intend to cover all AI transactions, but covers just four themes in a limited set of geographies