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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.
We are thrilled to share a few photographs and stories from this year’s invite-only Annual General Meeting – a special event where our LPs connect in person with our team, portfolio companies and experts.
It was a pleasure to host entrepreneurs, investors, researchers and special guests such as Maria Gotsch, Andy Parsons, Mark Kalow, Fernando De La Torre, Thomas Knox, Rebekah Griesenauer, Hani Eskandari, Omar Issa, Rebecca Paoletti, Robert Levitan, Serge Belongie, Emi Gal, Summer Bedard, Dave Zohrob, Dawn Barber, Jeremiah Robison and many more!
Our Annual General Meeting was a true highlight – full of thoughtful conversations, valuable insights and genuine connection. We’re grateful to everyone who joined us and contributed to making it a success!
It was a pleasure to host entrepreneurs, investors, researchers and special guests such as Maria Gotsch, Andy Parsons, Brian Cohen, Mark Kalow, Fernando De La Torre, Kristin Dana, Carlos Bhola, Thomas Knox, Matthew Zeiler, Rebekah Griesenauer, Hani Eskandari, Omar Issa, Rebecca Paoletti, Robert Levitan, Andres Glusman, Seth Haberman, Kelly Hoey, Medha Vedaprakash, Emi Gal, Adam Maher, Summer Bedard, Dave Zohrob, Dawn Barber, Jeremiah Robison and many more!
Our 11th Annual LDV Vision Summit was our most attended event to date, bringing together deep tech entrepreneurs, technologists, academics, researchers and investors for engaging discussions on cutting-edge visual tech and AI innovations. We were thrilled to welcome speakers from Sequoia Capital, NVIDIA, IBM, Kleiner Perkins, Phare Bio, IVP, Mitra Chem, BAM Corner Point, Duke University, Fortune, Argonne National Laboratory, Princeton University, The Pioneer Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Fieldstone Bio. Three of our LDV Capital portfolio companies also presented: Synthesia, DANNCE AI and ResiQuant.
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.
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.
We at LDV Capital have been investing in AI for over 10 years to date, and have made 7 investments in teams building businesses leveraging Generative AI since 2018. We believe that this technology has significant commercial value as a utility that will empower SaaS businesses to disrupt legacy enterprises. Check out this article to learn more and see some examples of exponentially growing commercial applications in content creation, biotech and more.
Curious about where the next visual technology investment opportunities are? Meet Lux Capital’s Deena Shakir, M12’s Samir Kumar, DCVC’s Kelly Chen, and Bloomberg’s Sarah McBride and see them discuss how Gen Z doesn’t see the camera as an app, they see it as a platform; how the next world war will not be fought by people, but by AI; and so much more!
Our portfolio company Voyant Photonics raised $15.4M in Series A funding to bring developer kits with the world's first silicon-photonics chip-scale FMCW LiDAR system to their customers. Their tiny sensors can analyze any environment, in any lighting from bright sunlight to pitch darkness with millimeter precision, are immune to interference, that sense position, motion, and even the materials objects are made of and are affordable for any application.
We welcome Dr. Kate Darling in our Women Leading Visual Tech interview series. She is a leading expert in Robot Ethics and a researcher at MIT's Media Lab. Abigail Hunter-Syed and Dr. Darling spoke about our tendency to assign human characteristics to the machines in our lives - anyone else ever apologizes to Roomba? How about cursed at Alexa? See how Dr. Darling thinks we should approach our relationships with robots.
In our latest LDV Insights Report, we examined the opportunities for visual technologies across animal agriculture and found that there is a tremendous opportunity. From meat processing to feed efficiency, animal quality of life and dairy, there are exciting new applications for computer vision and machine learning. Merritt Jenkins, Summer Associate at LDV in 2020, presents some of our findings.
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.
As experts in visual technologies, we at LDV Capital produce an annual proprietary LDV Insights report, where we deep dive into a sector where visual technology will revolutionize businesses. Previously, we covered healthcare, manufacturing, logistics, and more. This year, we researched the future of food and agriculture.
Our next guest in the Women Leading Visual Tech series is Gaile Gordon, a co-founder of TYZX, acquired by Intel.LDV Capital’s Abigail Hunter-Syed spoke with Gaile about her career in deep tech.
Merritt Jenkins is at MIT Sloan School of Management. He has eight years of experience deploying robot hardware and vision systems in harsh environments including at Plenty (a Softbank-backed vertical farming company) and Pattern Ag (a VC-backed startup developing genetic analyses of the soil microbiome). He has an MSc in Robotics from CMU and a dual BA/BEng from Dartmouth. Merritt is looking forward to learning more about the investing process and the landscape of computer vision startups.
Evan Nisselson, General Partner at LDV Capital, interviewed Hadley Harris, the Founding General Partner at Eniac, about his experience investing in visual tech. Hadley has done a little bit of everything on the path to co-founding Eniac, starting out as an engineer at Pegasystems, a product manager at Microsoft, and a strategist at Samsung. He ran a few aspects of the business across product and marketing at Vlingo prior to its sale to Nuance. He also served as CMO at Thumb until it was acquired.
Viorica Patraucean is a Research Scientist at Google DeepMind. At our Vision Summit 2018, she enlightened us with her recent work on massively parallel video nets and how it’s especially relevant for real-world low-latency/low-power applications.
Rudina Seseri is the Founder & Managing Partner of Glasswing Ventures. With over 14 years of investing and transactional experience, she has led technology investments and acquisitions in startup companies in the fields of robotics, the Internet of Things (IoT), SaaS marketing technologies, and digital media.
Rudina will be sharing her knowledge on trends and investment opportunities in visual technologies as a panelist and startup competition judge at the 2017 Annual LDV Vision Summit. We asked her some questions this week about her experience investing in visual tech and what she is looking forward to at the Vision Summit.