INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
An IoT-enabled lab for cannabis farmers, a system for catching drones mid-flight and the Internet of Cows are a few of the 17 startups
exhibiting today at Alchemist Accelerator’s 18th demo day
The event, which will be streamed live here, focuses on big data and AI startups with an enterprise bent.The startups are showing their
stuff at Juniper’s Aspiration Dome in Sunnyvale, California at 3pm today, but you can catch the whole event online if you want to see just
what computers and cows have in common
Here are the startups pitching onstage.Tarsier – Tarsier has built AI computer vision to detect drones
The founders discovered the need while getting their MBAs at Stanford, after one had completed a PhD in aeronautics
And getting into places they shouldn’t — prisons, RD centers, public spaces
Securing these spaces today requires antiquated military gear that’s clunky and expensive
And cheap, allowing them to serve markets the others can’t touch.Lightbox – Retail 3D is sexy — think virtual try-ons, VR immersion,
But creating these experiences means creating 3D models of thousands of products
Today, artists slog through this process, outputting a few models per day
Lightbox wants to eliminate the humans
This duo of recent UPenn and Stanford Computer Science grads claim their approach to 3D scanning is pixel perfect without needing artists
They have booked $40,000 to date and want to digitize all of the world’s products.Vorga – Cannabis is big business — more than $7
billion in revenue today and growing fast
The crop’s quality — and a farmer’s income — is highly sensitive to a few chemicals in it
Farmers today test the chemical composition of their crops through outsourced labs
Vorga’s bringing the lab in-house to the cannabis farmer via their IoT platform
The CEO has a PhD in chemical physics, and formerly helped the Department of Defense keep weapons of mass destruction out of the hands of
She’s now helping cannabis farmers get high… revenue.Neulogic – Neulogic is founded by a duo of Computer Science PhDs that led key
parts of Walmart.com product search
They now want to solve two major problems facing the online apparel industry: the need to provide curated inspiration to shoppers and the
need to offset rising customer acquisition costs by selling more per order
Their solution combines AI with a fashion knowledge graph to generate outfits on demand.Intensivate – Life used to be simple
Enterprises would use servers primarily for function-driven applications like billing
Today, servers are all about big data, analytics and insight
Intensivate thinks servers need a new chip upgrade to reflect that change
They are building a new CPU they claim gets 12x the performance for the same cost
Hardware plays like this are hard to pull off, but this might be the team to do it
It includes the former co-founder and CEO of CPU startup QED, which was acquired for $2.3 billion, and a PhD in parallel computation who was
on the design team for the Alpha CPU from DEC.Integry – SaaS companies put a lot of effort into building out integrations
Integry provides app creators their own integrations marketplace with pre-boarded partners so they can have apps working with theirs from
The vision is to enable app creators to mimic their own Slack app directory without spending the years or the millions
Because these integrations sit inside their app, Integry claims setup rates are significantly better and churn is reduced by as much as 40
percent.Cattle Care – AI video analytics applied to cows! Cattle Care wants to increase dairy farmers’ revenue by more than $1 million
per year and make cows healthier at the same time
The product identifies cows in the barn by their unique black and white patterns
Algorithms collect parameters such as walking distance, interactions with other cows, feeding patterns and other variables to detect
Then the system sends alerts to farm employees when they need to take action, and confirms the problem has been solved
afterwards.VadR – VR/AR is grappling with a lack of engaging content
VadR thinks the cause is a broken feedback loop of analytics to the creators
This trio of IIT-Delhi engineers has built machine learning algorithms that get smarter over time and deliver actionable insights on how to
modify content to increase engagement.Tika – This duo of ex-Googlers wants to help engineering managers manage their teams better
Managers use Tika as an AI-powered assistant over Slack to facilitate personalized conversations with engineering teams
The goal is to quickly uncover and resolve employee engagement issues, and prevent talent churn.GridRaster – GridRaster wants to bring
The problem AR/VR is compute-intensive
Latency, bandwidth and poor load balancing kill AR/VR on mobile networks
The solution For this trio of systems engineers from Broadcom, Qualcomm and Texas Instruments, it’s about starting with enterprise use
cases and building edge clouds to offload the work
They have 12 patents.AitoeLabs – Despite the buzz around AI video analytics for security, AitoeLabs claims solutions today are plagued
with hundreds of thousands of false alarms, requiring lots of human involvement
The engineering trio founding team combines a secret sauce of contextual data with their own deep models to solve this problem
They claim a 6x reduction in human monitoring needs with their tech
They’re at $240,000 ARR with $1 million of LOIs.Ubiquios – Companies building wireless IoT devices waste more than $1.8 billion because
of inadequate embedded software options making products late to market and exposing them to security and interoperability issues
The Ubiquios wireless stack wants to simplify the development of wireless IoT devices
The company claims their stack results in up to 90 percent lower cost and up to 50 percent faster time to market
Qualcomm is a partner.4me, Inc. – 4me helps companies organize and track their IT outsourcing projects
They have 16 employees, 92 customers and generate several million in revenue annually
Storm Ventures led a $1.65 million investment into the company.TorchFi – You know the pop-up screen you see when you log into a Wi-Fi
hotspot TorchFi thinks it’s a digital gold mine in the waiting
Their goal is to convert that into a sales channel for hotspot owners
Their first product is a digital menu that transforms the login screen into a food ordering screen for hotels and restaurants
Cisco has selected them as one of 20 apps to be distributed on their Meraki hotspots.Cogitai – This team of 16 PhDs wants to usher in a
more powerful type of AI called continual learning
The founders are the fathers of the field — and include professors in computer science from UT Austin and U Michigan
Unlike what we commonly think of as AI, Cogitai’s AI is built to acquire new skills and knowledge from experience, much like a child does
They have closed $2 million in bookings this year, and have $5 million in funding.LoadTap – On-demand trucking apps are in vogue
LoadTap explicitly calls out that it is not one
This team, which includes an Apple software architect and founder with a family background in trucking, is an enterprise SaaS-only solution
for shippers who prefer to work with their pre-vetted trucking companies in a closed loop
LoadTap automates matching between the shippers and trucking companies using AI and predictive analytics
They’re at $90,000 ARR and growing revenue 50 percent month over month.Ondaka – Ondaka has built a VR-like 3D platform to render
industrial information visually, starting with the oil and gas industry
For these industrial customers, the platform provides a better way to understand real-time IoT data, operational and job site safety issues
and how reliable their systems are
The product launched two months ago, they have closed three customers already and are projecting ARR in the six figures
They have raised $350,000 in funding.
