6 Startups with Most Interesting Pitches at Web Summit
The one and only Web Summit is over, and I finally can wrap my head around it. As I expected, it was a huge and organizers worked really hard to gather more than 70k participants, countless celebrities, and media outlets that came to witness the show. During 5 action-packed days, I could see the venue filled up with interesting (and sometimes groundbreaking) ideas from smaller companies in ALPHA programme, featured startups list, and the PITCH competition for those keep their eyes on the prize.
It’s pretty hard to keep track of all the startups, especially if you meet hundreds of new people every freaking day. But there were a few presentations that did impress me and I would absolutely love to see them rise to their glory.
Wayve
First and foremost, the PITCH winner itself is no joke of an achievement. This year the outlandish-looking, self-driving cars from Wayve claimed the award, and the jury had every right to give them victory. In their pitch, the company talked about AI algorithms, how they can affect our future, the technology behind their idea, and how making advances in this area has paid off big time for Wayve.
Also, they discussed why and how machine learning can steadily lower the risks when driving the roads. Wayve has already started rolling their product out to the UK roads for testing, showcasing the perspective of their sensors that view this world as a sort of a heat map. Wayve’s main advantage is the ability to drive to new places or cities with almost no data, being able to analyze the environment and expand the software to make it a great solution for future scaling.
Launched in Cambridge, this startup has received seed funding in May and is already planning to unleash their product to several UK cities in the upcoming years. I look forward to seeing how these smart cars can change the way we perceive driving.
lvl5
Yet another startup that is focused on artificial intelligence applied to autonomous vehicles, lvl5 takes another approach to make your life safer. Their offer is to simply replace the expensive sensors with cameras and software that will only cost €12 in total. After scanning the environment via LiDAR technology, the data is refined and added to the global map full of 3D road models all around the world. This map gets shared among the users in a collaborative manner which allows for easy scaling and no efforts for the customers’ side.
It pretty much works as Google Streets View but doesn’t require any additional cars or software power, just a cheap cam. This isn’t a revolutionary technology but is surely a great step in the right direction of making the cutting-edge technology affordable for an average Joe.
FactMata
Starting the hysteria around the fake news from the 2016 US elections, there were lots of accusations from both political camps whether or not it played a deciding role in the voting outcome and those that are about to happen in the future.
FactMata (short from Factor Matters) is about to put the end to this madness thanks to the human-assisted AI which will spot the fake news and extreme clickbait titles. In their pitch, they talked about how existing and constantly expanding database will help fact checkers, journalists, and the general audience to see if the media outlet tries to purposely mislead their readers in close to real time.
It also serves as a great solution to the marketing campaigns to avoid placing their ads on the sites that contain fake news, extremist speech, and all the types of gross content, since no one wants to become a part of the next “Adpocalypse”.
Based in London, this startup was highly acclaimed by the very people interested in fact-checking, including Bloomberg, TechCrunch, and Forbes, now adding another accolade to their honor after Web Summit PITCH competition where they took the 3rd place.
Meeshkan
Meeshkan came up with a very interesting solution: what if the data scientists could simply exclude the bugs from their job? Well, at least when they’re absent from their Machine Learning (ML) capacities overnight and come to the job just to see that a single bug ruined the whole calculation. The ML scheduler was designed to grant the 24/7 access to the data scientists whenever they find it convenient, as the idle CPUs became fully susceptible to the adjustments from aside. They managed to showcase its effectiveness when using ML libraries in Scala, Python, and R — the must-have languages for data scientists.
Another nice bonus is their reactive interface that successfully utilizes WhatsApp, Slack, and Messenger to make it even a more convenient tool for speeding up Machine Learning and making it easy-to-interact for the data pros.
Asyncy
We couldn’t just play along and ignore those who try to make programming easy for all sorts of people. Okay, everybody, this is Asyncy and their Storyscript: an object-oriented high-level programming language that should help you become a developer. That’s a very bold move, given how usually high the barrier of entry is, so they reduced the whole ecosystem down to three tools: Hub for microservices and functions discovery, Dashboard for data analytics and KPI management, and Asyncy Platform that runs the Storyscript as a Kubernetes plugin. While making app logic in Storyscript, the devs are capable of choreographing the services written in any languages or scripts. This is designed to alleviate the pressure from creating the apps and focus more on their logic thanks to the overall microservices convenience and the simplistic code nature.
This Amsterdam-based startup aims to create a mass of Storyscript developers and releases their Asyncy as a free product with an open source, so don’t mind checking it out.
Apply Digital Systems
No-code development is nothing new to the market so it was a joy seeing a startup that has some distinctive features. Apply’s concept evolves around uploading the Photoshop files to be further handled by a no-code UI creation tool, API mapping, analytics, content management system, and integration capabilities, which is nothing new but… Their SaaS product has no way to create the business logic, they simply utilize it from the apps they are integrated with. As a result, we have something called “platform of platforms” that eliminates the needs of creating your business logic and expands the range of people who can create their own native mobile app front ends.
Yes, this can now be me and you, the new punk wave of non-technical application builders who only need a Photoshop file for that purpose… what a time to be alive!
