Tag: Microsoft Ventures

Innovate.AI – Announcing Our Investment in Envisagenics

Pictured S. Somasegar and Nagraj Kashyap

Today, in partnership with M12 (the newly renamed Microsoft Ventures), we are excited to announce the N. American winner of the Innovate.AI competition, a global startup competition to find the next generation of companies building intelligent applications.

The winning company, Envisagenics, has been awarded a $1M investment from Madrona Venture Group and M12, and we look forward to joining them on their journey to help solve some of the toughest problems in healthcare and biotechnology today.

Envisagenics Team.

We first explored the idea of an AI-focused startup competition with M12 in early 2017. Both Madrona and M12 have made large investments in AI, and we thought M12 would be the best partner to take this idea and help us reach a larger base of startups across North America. M12 was excited to partner with us on this and in addition took it global.

We received 250+ applications from companies in North America. Startups needed to have built products, achieved some level of customer progress and have raised limited capital to enter.

Working together with the team at M12, we pared this list of 250+ down to 9 finalists, who were working on intelligent applications in the fields of healthcare, financial services, cybersecurity, software development, enterprise sales, computer vision and manufacturing automation.

Each of the final teams were then invited to spend two days in Seattle at the Madrona and Microsoft offices to get to know one another and pitch to a team of VCs from both firms. The final presentations typically involved a presentation, Q&A, and live demo of the products, and we were very impressed with the quality of products that these teams have built.

Envisagenics, our winning company, is in the business of applying AI to RNA splicing. Founded by Maria Pineda and Martin Akerman, the company is using their proprietary data and machine learning models to build a drug discovery platform targeted at the large number of diseases caused by RNA splicing defects.

This is a big problem and an impactful solution. Approximately 15% of all diseases are caused by disrupted splicing, including 50% of rare genetic disorders. Healthcare companies can drastically accelerate their drug discovery processes by using Envisagenics’s data and machine learning models to prioritize drug targets and biomarkers.

We believe there is massive potential in the future of intelligent applications, and we are thrilled to be investing in a company that is applying the power of ML and AI to a key pain point in the world of healthcare.

Please join us in welcoming Envisagenics to the Madrona and M12 families!

The Finalists in Microsoft Ventures and Madrona Venture Group Innovate.AI Startup Competition

It’s been an exciting time since we announced the Innovate.AI startup competition with our partners at Microsoft Ventures last October. What started as an idea we shared with our friends there, evolved into a global competition generating interest from some of the most innovative companies in the ML/AI field. We’ve been thrilled with the enthusiasm and strong response we received and would like to thank each participating company for their submission and the judges for the countless hours they spent evaluating each application.

The competition showcased the breadth of problems and use cases that companies are addressing by applying ML/AI. A couple of interesting observations about trends from the applicant pool emerged:

  • Intelligent Applications are on the rise – as data become plentiful and easily available and accessible, using AI and ML to build a continuous learning system is a fundamental fabric of every application is the way of the future. Many of the companies are targeting a variety of industries with plentiful and readily available datasets.
  • Innovation follows data availability – most companies that are thinking about innovative ways to provide insights and predictive analytics focus a lot on their data strategy and how to best organize and use the data they have as an integral part of the value they can and want to deliver to their customers.
  • Business models are still evolving: most ML/AI companies don’t fit the traditional software model of selling licenses or software-as-a-service. We saw a combination of business models, some leaning towards pure professional services, others a hybrid between licensing and SaaS. It’s clearly an area that will evolve as the companies mature.

Additionally, we saw a concentration in the following verticals:

  • Healthcare & Research: personal and mental health assistants, drug research and diagnosis, and computer vision to spot patterns and abnormalities.
  • Financial Services: research summaries and insights for investment professionals.
  • IoT & Edge Computing: analyzing data from edge devices, predictive maintenance, security and autonomous vehicle applications
  • Sales & Marketing: optimizing leads and focusing sales people on top opportunities.
  • Retail: Using computer vision to automatically recognize and tag items in images and video, enhanced advertising & shopping experiences.

And finally, we’d like to congratulate all of our finalists and welcome them to the final stage of the competition. Here is a closer look at who they are:

  • Alpha Vertex: cognitive systems for the financial services community.
  • ConceptualEyes: accelerates the speed of pharmaceutical research and discovery with artificial intelligence.
  • Envisagencis, Inc.: uses artificial intelligence to unlock cures for hundreds of diseases caused by RNA splicing.
  • FunnelBeam: a customizable sales intelligence platform.
  • ID R&D Inc: next-generation authentication solutions including voice, behavioral, and fusion biometrics.
  • TARA Intelligence Inc: a SaaS application to scope projects, assign developers, and monitor ongoing performance to build software faster.
  • Uru: fusing computer vision and artificial intelligence to create better ad experiences for video.
  • Wallarm: an adaptive, intelligent, application security platform.
  • Waygum, Inc.: intelligent IOT platform and mobile app for manufacturing.

 

To see a list of finalists in Europe and Israel, visit Microsoft Ventures.

 

Announcing the Microsoft Ventures and Madrona Venture Group AI Startup Competition

Today we are announcing our partnership with Microsoft Ventures to launch the Innovate.AI global startup competition. We are thrilled to be working with Microsoft on this project to find the world’s most promising early stage startups tackling unsolved problems, at scale, using machine learning and artificial intelligence.

At Madrona we have been early believers and investors in the transformative power of Artificial Intelligence and intelligent applications. The convergence of cloud computing (massive amounts of compute and storage available on the cloud at reasonable price points), specialized chips for machine learning (e.g., GPUs and FPGAs), and new advances in machine learning algorithms has created a unique opportunity for startups to build high value intelligent applications powered by unique and proprietary sources of data.

We have invested early with several platform companies and are actively looking at vertical applications. Examples include Turi, purchased by Apple, Lattice Data, purchased by Apple, Xnor.ai, MightyAI, Amperity, SmartAssist, Suplari, Saykara, Versive and others.

In thinking about how we might reach companies as early as possible we came up with a couple of ideas including developing an “American Idol” like competition. In discussions with our friends at Microsoft – we saw that we were aligned on interests in finding, supporting and investing in AI focused startups in the early days and we worked together to develop the AI:Innovate competition which Microsoft is taking Global.

We believe that in the next five to ten years, the impact of these technologies will transform most industries, from education, to real estate, to manufacturing, to transportation, to healthcare and we have only begun to see the impact of machine learning on the economy and society.

Over the next six months, Madrona will work closely with Microsoft Ventures to select a batch of promising startups that are either building new products and platforms with data and machine learning at their core or using AI to build the next generation intelligent applications. These startups will compete for a $1M investment from Madrona and Microsoft Ventures as well as an Azure package of credits, Office 365 licenses, and technical support worth over $500K.

Additionally, startups may also win an “AI for Good” prize that will be awarded to one startup that is using AI to create a positive impact on society, which will earn $500K in funding from Microsoft Ventures and Azure package of credits, licenses, and support worth over $500K.

The qualification requirements for startups to participate in the Innovate.AI global startup competition are as follows:

  • Companies that have raised no more than $4M in equity funding and/or loans at day of application
  • Companies that offer or intend to release or build a product or platform which utilize machine learning; such product/service/platform must be based on a model developed by the company, and/or be trained with data obtained/generated by the company or a 3rd party, and/or make use of pre-trained ML/AI APIs
  • Companies can utilize any technology stack or cloud platform to build their product, but the intention will be to work with the winners to help them utilize Azure and MS technology through our BizSpark offers and portfolio development efforts

See Peggy Johnson’s (EVP, Microsoft) blog post for more details about this competition.

Madrona is excited to kick off the Innovate.AI competition with Microsoft Ventures to find the next generation of great machine learning and artificial intelligence companies. The competition begins this month with applications, and we intend to select a final winner by Spring 2018. To find out more about entering the competition or submit an application, please visit the Innovate:AI page to view more information!