LDV Blog

At LDV Capital's 2026 Annual General Meeting, Principal Ash Cleary outlined how visual technology and AI are driving the next wave of intelligent automation across legacy industries. Moving beyond basic digitization, advances in computer vision, machine perception, robotics, digital twins, and spatial intelligence are enabling autonomous decision-making in logistics, construction, manufacturing, and mining. The article explores trillion-dollar opportunities emerging from these technologies and why visual data is becoming the foundation for the future of industrial infrastructure.

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!

We are pleased to share an interview with Sumanta Talukdar, CEO & Founder at Gardin and Evan Nisselson.

1. What is Gardin’s mission?

Agriculture is the only foundational industry that doesn’t measure its product accurately and at scale. This has kept a $1T digitization opportunity virtually untapped. Gardin’s mission is to unlock this opportunity by enabling food producers, for the first time, to measure the biology of their crops in real-time and effectively at scale.

2. How is Gardin’s optical phenotyping stack differentiated from alternative sensing or analytics solutions in precision agriculture today?

Gardin is the only solution that delivers on 4 critical requirements simultaneously to greenhouse growers. First, our multimodal robotic optical sensors measure crop photosynthesis in real time and at scale. Second, our Gardin AI brain transforms raw biological signals into clear, actionable insights for growers. Third, the entire platform operates fully autonomously, removing manual data collection and interpretation. Fourth, Gardin is delivered through a scalable SaaS model, aligning our success with our customers’ outcomes.

We are honored to work with brilliant people every day!

Since founding in 2012, LDV Capital is a thesis-driven early-stage venture fund investing in people building businesses powered by visual technology and artificial intelligence. Our thesis = a majority of the data our brains analyze is visual. Therefore, the majority of the data artificial intelligence will analyze will also be visual across the light and electromagnetic spectrum.

People used to say that our thesis was cute, niche and science fiction. Now it is validated.

We invest horizontally across all sectors such as: agriculture, healthcare, nanotechnology, logistics, manufacturing, entertainment, mobility, construction, optics, sensors, life sciences and biotech, robotics, materials science, video, mapping, security, and much more.

LDV Capital IV: We are investing out of our 4th fund which was announced in 2024.

LDV Capital I & II are returned. We continue to have significant upside potential across each of our funds thanks to our brilliant entrepreneurs, experts, team, and LP partners.

Arcturus has created a volumetric video platform that captures and broadcasts sports action in full 3D. They redefine how we connect with our favorite sports moments by delivering compelling new camera angles for 2D broadcasters and new 3D sports experiences never possible before on mobile or immersive devices. Their SaaS platform delivers the capture, processing, production, and distribution of this content. We are thrilled to partner with Steve Sullivan, Devin Horsman, Ewan Johnson, Fraser McArthur, and the entire Arcturus team as they deliver the future of live 3D broadcast quality sports coverage.

We led their $2.3M seed round with participation from Myelin VC, Vanderbilt University, and angel investors including Harvard Business School Alumni Angels of Greater New York.

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.

We’re excited to welcome Ross Cooke to our LDV Capital team. We were impressed by his communication style, problem-solving skills and expertise in nanoscience, physics, chemistry of advanced materials, and materials science. Ross is particularly interested in how visual technologies and AI can transform long-established industries where innovation can have an outsized impact, such as healthcare, energy, and mining. He is also excited about opportunities in materials science and supply chain.

We are very excited to partner with the fantastic deep tech team at ResiQuant that is developing a platform that utilizes agentic AI and computer vision to transform data into actionable, building-level insights. This empowers property owners and carriers to mitigate vulnerabilities, streamline workflows, and enhance underwriting decisions.

We at LDV Capital led their $4M seed round with participation from Foothill Ventures, Pear VC, Alumni Ventures, and angels.

We are thrilled to share that we have returned our LDV Capital I & II funds. We continue to have significant upside potential across each of our funds thanks to our brilliant entrepreneurs, experts, team, and LP partners.

We continue investing out of our LDV Capital IV fund.

LPs say we are highly differentiated, disciplined, have high-quality sourcing, and successfully create value by investing in category leaders at the earliest stages.

In September 2021, Ash Cleary began his venture capital journey by joining Evan Nisselson and our LDV Capital team as an Analyst, investing out of Fund III as part of a two-year program. After successfully completing the program, Ash was promoted to Associate and now invests out of LDV Capital's fourth fund.

Check out his insights and reflections on the past three years—working with the team and collaborating with brilliant deep tech entrepreneurs worldwide, building businesses powered by visual technology and artificial intelligence.

We are excited to partner and invest in the brilliant VitVio team. They are building an AI-driven computer vision platform designed to enhance the safety and efficiency of hospital operating theaters.

We at LDV Capital led their $2M pre-seed round with participation from Bek Ventures (ex-Earlybird), Tiny Supercomputer Investment Company, and angel investors.

VitVio has also announced their pilot program with the Royal Orthopaedic Hospital (ROH), one of the UK's three leading medical institutions in orthopedic care and “one of the best hospitals in the world.”

As we approach our 10th Summit anniversary on March 21, 2024, we decided to go down memory lane and spotlight the exceptional fireside chat speakers LDV Capital's Evan Nisselson has had the privilege to witness and interview over the years. These leaders come from companies such as DeepMind, Sequoia Capital, Union Square Ventures, Meta, Spark Capital, FirstMark, Universal Pictures, Greylock Partners, Snap, First Round Capital, OpenWater, and more.

Who wants to live healthier and longer lives? Recent advancements in visual technologies, machine learning, and artificial intelligence will increase human longevity. Solutions ranging from analyzing health records, blood results, physiological test scores, body scans, biotechnologies, and even genetic tests will be a game-changer in longevity healthcare. Whether you are looking to “optimize your performance” – be that physical or cognitive performance – or interested to learn about longevity medicine able to push the limits of the human lifespan – this panel from our 9th Annual LDV Vision Summit covers that and more!

Fantastic technology innovators, serial entrepreneurs, deep tech researchers, and investors across the New York tech ecosystem gathered to discuss the latest trends in visual technologies. Check out photographs from our most recent LDV Happy Hour event.

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.

Which business sectors will be the most disrupted by visual technologies and AI in the next 10 years? In the lead-up to our 9th Annual LDV Vision Summit – the premier global gathering in visual tech – hosted virtually on March 28, investors from Seedcamp, Northzone, Insight Partners, DCVC, VAS Ventures, Air Street Capital, and we at LDV Capital share insights.

Which sectors over the next 10 years will have the most societal impact from research advancements leveraging visual technologies and artificial intelligence? In the lead-up to our 9th Annual LDV Vision Summit – the premier global gathering in visual tech – hosted virtually on March 28, we addressed this and 4 other burning questions to 11 brilliant professors & researchers.

In the lead-up to our 9th Annual LDV Vision Summit – the premier global gathering in visual tech (hosted virtually on March 28), we interviewed some of our past & future speakers. Meet Luc Vincent of Meta, Steffen Tjerrild of Synthesia, Kristen Fortney of BioAge, Clément Farabet, Camilo Fosco of Memorable, Alexandra Boussommier of ImVitro, Michael Geer of Humanity, Henrik Haugbølle of Uizard, Mariano Battan of Mural, Alexandre Winter of Norbert Health, Andrew Rabinovich of Headroom, Karin Andrea Stephan of Earkick, Adam Paulisick of maad labs, and Rebecca Paoletti of CakeWorks.

We could not have accomplished this exciting milestone without our inspiring portfolio founders, experts, community members, co-investors, and LDV LPs. Thank you!

We are thrilled to partner and invest in the deep tech team at Memorable. They are building cutting-edge technology to optimize ads for a higher impact on branding and conversion. Memorable's AI models are based on cognitive science to maximize the memorability, saliency, and conversion potential of both videos and images.