Learnings from Z02 and going forward to Z03
Going into Z02, we wanted to try the following things:
- Partner with organisations like AWS, Cooley, SendGrid to provide resources to founders, and MTR who provided video data so that companies could train their algorithms
- Focusing on pitch and strategy in the first two weeks, to align teams to a hypothesis trajectory
- Invite Venture Partners to travel to see the teams in the first two weeks to actively help and probe pitch and strategy
- Migrate team management to Slack and invite all Z02 participants, including Venture Partners to better facilitate conversations
- Focusing on the quality of Venture Partners rather than quantity and allowing them to develop deeper connections with teams by facilitating weekly calls
- Host weekly Master Dinners, where the world’s best minds contribute and share their knowledge with the founders, so we learn different mental frameworks. Guests include experts in blockchain like Trent McConaghy; Shai Oster, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist at the Information; founder of Araya, a human conscious AI startup, Ryota Kanai; Ben Goertzel, founder of Singularity Net; founder of Sensay, Ariel Jalali; and community development leader Tim Falls.
- Support fundraising by devoting the last two weeks exclusively to pitch preparation, fundraising tactics, and knowledge development
For the second cohort Z02, we had 12 companies representing 8 countries and 11 industries. They represent the best companies we’ve had and tackling important issues. We’re super proud of Z02, the bonds they created, and the impact they will create.
Also a big salute to Partners who contributed over 800 hours of mentoring to the founders, and we salute Sachin Unni, Hajime Hotta, Rodolfo Rosini, Alexandre Winter, Eamonn Carey, Takahiro Shoji, Antoine Blondeau, Katherina Lacey, and Phil Chen, Jaan Tallinn, and Chih-han yu.
The Z02 companies are:
- Automorph automates creating SaaS products by teaching our AI to code. The initial focus is for it to create, configure and deploy source code for back-end services, web, mobile and desktop apps from model- driven specifications.
- dishq is a food AI company. The unique technology leverages food science and rich dish data to understand and predict people’s taste preferences.
- Emotics analyses employee engagement with compliance training to help optimize the training process and identify high-risk areas for breaches of compliance. They analyse behaviour, including using webcams for identity verification and measuring emotional engagement with online training to reduce gaming of compliance training.
- Etymo is the best platform for discovering cutting-edge AI research by connecting papers by concepts, thus reinventing the search and reading experience. The vision is to put the entire research process on the web and making scientific knowledge accessible for everyone.
- FamFit is helping people get healthier through AI powered social fitness games. They are building an AI engine that can identify your exercise movements on your mobile device and then turning that into a currency you can spend in games.
- Fano Labs (formerly known as Accosys) develops artificial intelligence (AI) technologies and provides AI concierge services to the service industry, such as malls and hotels, and public sector, such as airports and schools. The focus is on Chinese local dialects, which make up for a significant portion of Mainland China call center calls.
- Foxsy is an interest-based chat platform focused on connecting users across multiple messenger platforms. With 500,000 users, Foxsy has facilitated over 4 million conversation based on user information and interests.
- H3O is a personality engine that scales brand personalities to automate communication online. They empower their customers to scale personalized, high-touch consumer experiences using proprietary machine learning technology, so the right ad can be served at the right place, at the right time.
- Laboratik’s mission is to dynamically drive human creativity by changing the way people work. Their smart productivity bot “A;” helps company managers/members of distributed workforces to understand their team’s engagement by analyzing chat conversations in real-time with NLP.
- Marax AI’s mission is to solve churn for mobile first businesses by building an AI driven Software as a Service platform that (1) predicts potential churn users; (2) understands why users will churn: (3) provides recommendations to retain users and maximize lifetime value.
- Scry is a crowdsourced prediction engine that provides quantitative estimates of the probability of strategic events around the world. In doing so, we provide a market force that makes it quantifiably rewarding for individuals to think more broadly and rationally.
- SmartPeep is a MedTech startup that brings artificial intelligence (AI) together with human care to reduce falls. The solution is an AI camera that raises automatic alert when an elderly fall or a symptom of fall is detected.
So looking forward to our next cohort Z03, we made some changes to the way we operate.
- We will utilise our own algorithm to decide which startups to invest in. We have increased our algorithm to gather 3x more data points to more accurately assess companies. We’re excited to be the first AI accelerator program to utilise machine learning in this way. We believe in the power of algorithms, and that all human decision making can be automated and engineered in an algorithm.
- We are actively targeting Areas of Interests (AoI’s) in Logistics, Cybersecurity Voice and Speech/NLP, Agtech, Medtech, Robotics for our application
- To support these AoI’s, we have increased our Partners including: Jung Hee Ryu, Partner at Future Play, a leading AI and deep tech VC based in Korea, and successfully exited his computer vision startup to Intel. He will help founders think about the Korean market; Spencer Yang, cofounded KeyReply, a leading chat bot platform that works with customers like the Government of Singapore, MSIG, Zalora and other enterprises. He was at Twitter and leads AsiaPac for a esports cryptocurrency company — Unikrn; Rui Ma, previously was the China Partner at 500 and helping founders think about the China market and fundraising; Daniel Saito, early investor in FB, Asia Pac lead for MySQL, and crypto investor. He will help founders think about ICO’s; Jude O’Kelly, partner at Mount Parker Ventures, an early stage HK based fund. He will lead the logistics stream.
- We are hosting the first Beijing AI summit on Dec. 7th, where we will showcase the best AI startups both inside and outside China. We believe that China will be a force and lead the new AI era.
