Meeting recap
Iratel Ventures Breakfast Series #16
We hosted a gathering of local and global entrepreneurs, investors and active ecosystem players at Iratel Ventures Breakfast Series event last Thursday. At our next few sessions, discussions will be based on 20 emerging technologies. The technologies for this event were:
Human-Computer Interaction
IoT & Smart Connected Devices (City, Home, Transport, Consumer)
Manufacturing 2.0
You can find the full list of technologies we’re tracking here.
During this session these topics were discussed:
- Impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) devices on the ecosystem (E.g Amazon Echo)
- Applications that promise to save industrial and commercial customers money vs applications that are intended for consumer convenience
- Applications that can add to the top line for industrial and commercial entities
The group discussed that there are academic AI and NLP initiative in the fields Robotics, IoT, Social Platforms, Bioinformatics, Electric Grids, Cancer Detection and Game Theory. However, they are far from commercialisation, let alone devices in the market. The consumer is still not aware of the applications of such technologies. The main complication is the absence of enough research in Farsi language. Access to clean data sets and big data storage is also inhibiting many research efforts.
The bright spots are currently Banking and Healthcare sectors that are looking for ways to to have access to big data. In addition, ride sharing apps are churning big volumes of data (location, destination, time, frequency, gender of users etc.) that can be utilised in a meaningful way.
The group saw a distinction between problem first or tech first. Many of the startups need to focus on problem first and get to commercial viability in order to survive. This may hinder their prospects of having a tech first mentality.
Finally, it was decided to keep the discussions going in a semi-open environment and build a support platform for entrepreneurs which would become Breakfast Series’ digital twin. It was agreed that a semi-open Slack team would be the primary communication channel post events. Invitation to the Slack channel will be sent to the participants who provide their email address at the Breakfast Event and show an interest in being part of the discussions on the Breakfast Series Slack channel within a more selective Iratel Ventures Community.
The next event will be held on Thursday 29 June. The technology topics to be discussed are:
Digital Health
Biotech,Medtech, Pharma & Life Sciences
We believe the more open the dialogue, the better it will allow innovation and bringing different disciplines including investors together. These series were started to increase the dialogue opportunities among ecosystem players and especially to bridge the gap between those who are willing to know more about Iranian startup environment and meet up with other ecosystem players. This will increase openness and transparency.
Finally, if you’d like to be added to the breakfast mailing list, please sign up or follow us on LinkedIn.
This is the sixteenth in a series of posts about Iratel Ventures Events. We’d love to hear from teams with crazy (but commercial) startups. Get in touch or attend our breakfast series. Finally, don’t forget to get your IV Score or talk to ourFundingBot to prepare for your next VC meeting.
Thanks to Mahyar Khattak and Fardad Zand for their contributions.
