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As the biotech industry heavily relies on data filtering, analysis, and sharing, visual technologies play a critical role in detecting and imaging biological systems. This paves the way for the future of life sciences tools, enabling next-generation therapeutics, biomanufacturing, and longevity. At our 10th Annual LDV Vision Summit earlier this year, a panel of experts delved into these topics and explored various critical aspects shaping the future of biotechnology. Check out their insights.
We believe that visual technologies will continue to be the crux of advancements in materials science, across nanomaterials and metamaterials, resulting in the transformation of various industrial, medical and consumer applications. Embedded AI will enable materials to reconfigure themselves autonomously in response to their environment. As sensing abilities and algorithms improve, the full potential of navigating the compositional and configurational possibilities of materials will catalyze widespread transformation for optics, biomarker diagnostics, robotics, 3D printing and more.
As we approach the 10th Annual LDV Vision Summit, we thought it fitting to pose a few burning questions to Serge Belongie, a professor of Computer Science at the University of Copenhagen, the head of the Danish Pioneer Centre for Artificial Intelligence and LDV Capital Expert in Residence. We delved into his experiences as a prominent figure in AI and sought his insights on the present landscape of visual technologies. Additionally, we explored his thoughts on the prospects available to researchers aiming to bring their work to market and impact humanity at large.
The climate crisis is resulting in an increased frequency and intensity of natural disasters, and society needs new tools to be able to cope and adapt. Sonia Kastner is the CEO & founder of Pano AI, the leader in wildfire early detection and intelligence. Pano combines advanced hardware, AI and computer vision to automatically detect, verify and classify wildfire events in real-time.
At our 9th Annual LDV Vision Summit, Sonia shared how visual technologies are at the crux of disaster mitigation solutions to help tackle the climate crisis.
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.
In this fireside chat with LDV Capital General Partner Evan Nisselson, Clement Farabet, VP of Research at DeepMind, shared his views on the positives, negatives, and lessons learned from building artificial intelligence projects while at university, to founding a startup that successfully exited and at large Fortune 100 corporations.
AI lowers the barriers to creating high-quality content. Now anybody can be a good copywriter, author, poet, coder, or artist. Tune in to watch Peter Welinder’s keynote on OpenAI’s models and see how GPT-3, Codex, DALL-E and DALL-E 2 can supercharge creativity in your organization.
Honored to have DeepMind’s senior research scientist Dr. Jane Wang in our monthly interview series. This interview was recorded live on March 18th at our very first Women Leading Visual Tech community event. Jane spoke with Abby Hunter-Syed, Partner at LDV Capital, about how and where meta-learning will generate opportunities for business and society.
LDV Capital’s portfolio company Uizard built a web-based design tool for non-designers that lets anyone quickly and easily design and prototype digital products such as web and mobile apps. The company leverages visual technologies – computer vision and deep learning – to make their AI-design assistant a reality. For example, their technology can instantly convert hand-drawn wireframes into interactive designs. We had a chance to chat with Tony Beltramelli, Uizard’s Co-Founder and CEO, and ask him a couple of burning questions.
Evan Nisselson interviewed Samir Kumar, Managing Director of M12 – Microsoft's Venture Fund. Samir is leading investment activities in emerging tech areas including quantum computing and autonomous vehicles. Before joining M12, Samir worked in Qualcomm’s corporate R&D division, leading early-stage product validation, partnerships, acquisition, and strategy for embedded and on-device deep learning.
The next guest in our Women Leading Visual Tech Series is Carol Reiley, a serial entrepreneur and a computer scientist with the nickname “Mother of Robots”. LDV Capital’s Abigail Hunter-Syed spoke with Carol about current trends in robotics and AI. They touched on autonomous cars, healthcare, the food industry, and arts – all subject to being drastically transformed by advances in deep learning.
Please meet Kavita Bala – the next guest in our monthly Women Leading Visual Tech interview series. She is one of our most distinguished scholars, the dean of the Faculty of Computing and Information Science at Cornell University. Her work on scalable rendering, Lightcuts, is the algorithm in Autodesk’s cloud renderer. Dr. Bala co-founded GrokStyle, a company that won our 2016 LDV Vision Summit Entrepreneurial Computer Vision Competition. In 2019, her company was acquired by Facebook and now the future of shopping on Facebook is based on GrokStyle's tech. Read this interview to learn about Dr. Bala’s career path, current projects and her vision of the future of visual technologies.
LDV Capital’s Abigail Hunter-Syed kicks off our Women Leading Visual Tech series with the interview with Timnit Gebru. Timnit holds a Ph.D. from Stanford University and is currently the technical co-lead of the ethical artificial intelligence team at Google.
Fiona Hua talks about leading the perception team at Boston-based Sea Machines, one of our portfolio companies. Read on to learn about her journey from biometrics to autonomous vessels, how Sea Machines differentiates itself in the market, and more.
Evan Nisselson interviewed Matt Turck, a Partner of FirstMark Capital. He invests across a broad range of early-stage enterprise and consumer startups. Prior to FirstMark, he was a Managing Director at Bloomberg Ventures, the investment and incubation arm of Bloomberg LP, which he helped start. Previously, Matt was the co-founder of TripleHop Technologies, a venture-backed enterprise search software startup that was acquired by Oracle.
Evan Nisselson, General Partner at LDV Capital, interviewed Zavain Dar, Partner at Lux Capital, about his experience investing in visual tech. Zavain invests in companies that are using machine learning and AI to augment or replace physical-world functions including biology, language, manufacturing, and analysis. He looks for entrepreneurs that can use software and data to hone a philosophical position on where the world is, and how to direct it for the better.
In this article, Emi Gal talks about how Ezra is changing the game for cancer detection through visual technology. Read on to learn about his scientific research-driven approach, the long-term possibilities for Ezra.
The power of object recognition and the transformative effect of deep learning to analyze scenes and parse content can have a lot of impact on advertising. At the 2016 Annual LDV Vision Summit, Ken Weiner, CTO at GumGum told us about the impact of image recognition and computer vision in online advertising.
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.
LDV Capital invested in Matt, Adam, and their Clarifai vision in the summer of 2014, alongside Qualcomm Ventures, Google Ventures, Nvidia, and respected angels. Since then, they have added more impressive computer vision experts to their team, continued with fast iteration of their technology, and customers are already leveraging their services.