10 AI startups blossoming beyond Silicon Valley
As I was heading from Atlanta to San Francisco to talk about investing in artificial intelligence at MB 2017, it struck me how artificial intelligence may be the buzzword of this year. Every startup seems to need the “AI accessory” in their pitch. Alphabet declares itself an AI company. Investors are putting billions in artificial intelligence deals. Google launches an AI-investing special forces team. Philosophers bemoan a potential superhuman AI. There’s even AI therapy–have you seen AI-assisted mental health coach Sibly?
When I’m facing an AI-identity crises, I like to talk to a chatbot.
Anyone’s chatbot. The sizzling smarts on display always calm me down. Still, kidding aside, AI pretty much deserves its hype. The market is predicted to be $37B by 2025. I am convinced it’s the next wave of tech and will change how we do things as much as mobility did and as much as personal computing did before that.
One of the (mis)perceptions in artificial intelligence is that AI headquarters is somewhere near San Francisco.
While major enterprise tech firms with AI acquisition maws like Apple and Google are there, artificial intelligence is a wave you can catch anywhere.
Disruptive artificial intelligence startups outside of Silicon Valley speak for themselves — and some actually do, especially in the case of Dave or Motion.AI. Here are a few examples:
Chatbots hold a lot of promise, but for most applications, they aren’t smart enough yet. Motion.AI is solving for smarter chat bots by focusing on very specific use cases like restaurants and survey, and also building an abstracting layer around the chatbot to modernize the chatbot as a platform. Their client list includes Wix, Hubspot, LG, Kohls, Kia, Liberty Mutual, and Deutsche Telekom. They’ve launched a bot store where you can download chatbot templates, too.
“While we do have some team members on the coasts, Chicago has been a great place to grow our company,” says CEO David Nelson. “The machine learning talent pool has proven to be quite rich, in large part due to strong ML departments at the University of Chicago and UIUC. Because Chicago historically is a very strong sales operations hub, this gives us confidence in remaining headquartered in the area long-term.”
Dave is a learning chatbot designed to outsmart overdrafts. It predicts upcoming expenses and lets users borrow up to $75 to prevent an expensive overdraft fee.
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Started by two ex-Bank of America quants, Fuzzy Logix is a faster way for enterprise companies to get intelligence from large structured data sets. Their DB Lytix product works within existing databases to perform predictive analytics that takes hours instead of days, and requires no data export.
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