visual data — LDV Capital Blog on Visual Technologies and AI — LDV Capital
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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 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.
Evan Nisselson, Founder and General Partner of LDV Capital, explores technological advancements that are transforming bathrooms into triage centers for monitoring health, extending health spans and proactively saving lives.
At our 11th Annual LDV Vision Summit earlier this year, a panel of distinguished experts explored the future of materials science powered by visual tech and AI. Click the link below to hear from Dr. David Smith, Associate Chair and James B. Duke Distinguished Professor of ECE at Duke University; Dr. Kristin Schmidt, Strategy Assistant for Accelerated Discovery and Vice Chair of the Physical Sciences Council at IBM; Dr. Chirranjeevi Gopal, Co-Founder and CTO at Mitra Chem, the first lithium-ion battery materials manufacturer; Dr. Amanda Petford-Long, Director of the Materials Science Division at Argonne National Lab; and Ash Cleary, Associate at LDV Capital.
Meet Dr. Molly Gibson – Co-Founder and Chief Strategy & Innovation Officer at Generate:Biomedicines, Origination Partner at Flagship Pioneering. LDV Capital's Founder & General Partner Evan Nisselson discussed with Molly how AI and machine learning empower and disrupt the scientific process across life sciences, biotech, advanced materials and more.
If you missed our 10th Annual LDV Vision Summit, this is your chance to watch the video or read our shortened & lightly edited transcript.
Our Annual General Meetings (AGM) are exclusive, invite-only events for LDV Capital LPs, portfolio companies, LDV experts and special guests. We are thrilled to share a glimpse of our most recent AGM in New York City, giving you a unique opportunity to see what usually happens behind closed doors.
We are thrilled to partner and invest in the brilliant Sonus Microsystems team developing and commercializing a novel and proprietary ultrasound technology that utilizes polymer MEMS sensors to send and receive ultrasonic waves. They are ushering in a new era of ultrasound by commercializing high-performance, custom-designed linear and matrix array transducers for emerging applications in ultrasound imaging.
On March 21, at our 10th Annual LDV Vision Summit, Evan Nisselson, Founder and General Partner at LDV Capital, will speak with Dr. Molly Gibson – Co-Founder and Chief Strategy and Innovation Officer at Generate:Biomedicines. They will discuss how AI and machine learning empower and disrupt the scientific process across life sciences, biotech, advanced materials, and more. This will have a tremendous impact on business and society.
In the lead-up to the Summit, Evan had the privilege of asking Dr. Gibson a few questions.
We are pleased to announce that we have raised our fourth LDV Capital fund with $31M. We will continue investing in the same unique thesis that has not changed since founding LDV Capital in 2012. The majority of data our brains analyze is visual so the majority of data that AI will analyze will be visual as well. Visual data and visual technologies are critical for the success of artificial intelligence horizontally across all sectors.
Thrilled to present a selection of photos capturing moments from our recent invite-only "Happy Hour" event, held in New York City. This event brought together outstanding technology innovators, serial entrepreneurs, deep tech researchers, and investors from within the vibrant New York tech ecosystem.
Last year, we celebrated 10 years of investing in people building businesses powered by visual tech & AI, but it’s just the beginning! Visual technology innovations will continue to be the crux of automation for decades and beyond. Computer vision, machine learning and AI will be the key enablers for innovation in healthcare, precision medicine, manufacturing, construction, agriculture, sustainability, and many more industries.
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.
Automation is revolutionizing legacy industries from healthcare and precision medicine to manufacturing and construction, to agriculture and sustainability. The adoption of visual technology innovations will continue to remain the crux of automation for the next decade and beyond.
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.
We host our LDV Community Dinners & Happy Hours to bring together our tight-knit LDV community – the world’s brightest technology innovators, serial entrepreneurs, deep tech researchers and investors – to discuss cutting-edge visual tech. Check out a few photographs from our fourth and final 2022 “Happy Hour” event hosted in New York City.
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.
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!
“If the purpose of food is to provide us with nutrition, then shouldn't that be what we're measuring?”.
Sumanta Talukdar, founder and CEO of Gardin, gave a keynote speech at our 7th LDV Vision Summit. Tune in to watch the video or read the transcript and learn how the company leverages a combination of multispectral sensing, data fusion, computer vision, and machine learning to improve food production.
The next guest in our Women Leading Visual Tech series is Dr. Sujatha Ramanujan, a serial entrepreneur and seasoned executive with 25 years of experience in medical devices and consumer electronics. She currently serves as the Managing Director of Luminate – the world’s largest accelerator for startups with optics, photonics, and imaging enabled applications. LDV Capital’s Abigail Hunter-Syed spoke with Sujatha about managing a crisis, fear of boredom, and a mission to revitalize the Rochester area.