LDV Blog

Our 12th Annual LDV Vision Summit brought together deep tech entrepreneurs, technologists, academics, researchers and investors for engaging discussions on innovations in cutting-edge visual tech and AI. We continue to be excited by the accelerating convergence of visual tech and AI across both the digital and physical worlds.

We were thrilled to welcome speakers from Insight Partners, Mayo Clinic, Harvard Medical School, Bek Ventures, 01 Advisors, University of Oxford, The Pioneer Centre for Artificial Intelligence, and LocalGlobe among others.

A special thank you goes to our speakers and attendees!

Explore the "Internet of Eyes" (IoEyes) concept: a network of visual sensors and cameras that will give inanimate objects the ability to "see," exponentially impacting businesses and humanity through computer vision and AI. Written by Evan Nisselson, Founder and General Partner at LDV Capital, this article was originally published on The Next Web on May 13, 2016, and is being reposted without changes.

Every robot, drone, self-driving car, delivery bot, and surgical assistant that claims “intelligence” is fundamentally a product of visual and/or electromagnetic perception systems. The success of Physical AI doesn’t start with neural networks or GPUs – it starts with cameras, sensors, and spectral scanners that give machines their first sense of reality.

Physical AI will not succeed until machines can truly see.

Our Vision events bring together the world’s brightest technology innovators, serial entrepreneurs, deep tech researchers and investors to discuss the latest trends in visual tech and AI. Check out a few photographs from our most recent invite-only Happy Hour event hosted in New York City.

Synthesia, the market leader in AI video generation, announced their exciting $90 million Series C financing. The round is led by Philippe Botteri at Accel along with NVIDIA and existing investors. The company now officially hits unicorn status, and we are extremely proud of the brilliant co-founders, Victor Riparbelli, Steffen Tjerrild, Dr. Lourdes Agapito and Dr. Matthias Niessner, and the entire Synthesia team!

In April 2019, we led their Seed financing round when they were pre-product and pre-revenue. We met with 4 brilliant co-founders and were impressed with their big vision: to empower everyone to make video content without cameras, microphones, or studios.

This milestone reinforces our belief in the transformative power of visual technologies and AI and their pivotal role in shaping the future. At LDV Capital, we are honored to have played a very small part in their incredible journey which continues to evolve every day.

As seen on VentureBeat: Gryps raised $1.5M led by us – LDV Capital – with participation from PearVC, the Harvard Business School Graduate Syndicate, and a group of angel investors experienced in building enterprise software. Among them are the Antevy brothers who are experts in building software for the construction industry as co-founders of e-Builder.

Our LDV portfolio company Synthesia launched its AI-driven video production platform in the midst of the pandemic, and now thousands of customers – from Fortune 500 companies to individual creators – generate video content from text. Check out my interview with Victor Riparbelli, co-founder and CEO of Synthesia, about new ways to create video content.

Our sixth annual LDV Vision Summit was fantastic, a giant thank you to everyone who came and participated in making it another spectacular gathering. We are honored that you fly in from around the world each year to share insights, inspire, do deals, recruit, raise capital, and help each other succeed!

Leaving his role as founding director of Princeton's Computer Vision and Robotics Lab, Jianxiong Xiao (Professor X) founded AutoX. He spoke at our LDV Vision Summit 2017 about how he is working to lower the price of entry into the autonomous driving field with an innovative camera-first solution.

We are very excited to announce the close of our second fund for investing in people building visual technology businesses at the pre-seed or seed stage. You can read more about it on the Wall Street Journal.

Our annual LDV Vision Summit has two competitions:

1. Startup competition for promising visual technology companies with less than $2M in funding

2. Entrepreneurial Computer Vision Challenge (ECVC) for computer vision and machine learning students, professors, experts, or enthusiasts working on a unique solution to empower businesses and humanity.

Congratulations to our 2017 LDV Vision Summit Entrepreneurial Computer Vision Challenge Winner: Timnit Gebru.

Pete Warden went from computer vision studies at the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology in the United Kingdom to serial entrepreneur. After spending 3 years as co-founder and CTO, he sold Jetpac to Google. In this keynote, he shared insights about what he was working on at Google, stories about being an entrepreneur, and how analyzing images can improve the world.

Our next LDV Vision Summit will included over 80 international speakers with the purpose of exploring, understanding, and shaping the future of imaging and video in human communication. We will showcase the best startups and computer vision experts who compete in one of the following two competitions.