On Thursday May 13th, BootstrapLabs Principal Luigi Congedo participated in the webinar on Investing in AI – Financing Predictions and Landscape in 2021 – along with other industry experts.

Together with Lindsey S. Mignano (Smith Shapourian Mignano PC), Asif Moosani (Gradient Ventures), Owen Carton (NowCFO), and John Mannes (Basis Set), they had a conversation about the current state of the industry for early-stage AI startup founders, including topics such as:

• Financing and acquisition trends for early stage startups
• What early-stage American VCs investing in early-stage AI companies are looking for in 2021, and the realities of fundraising during a pandemic
• Strategies for raising, remotely, a pre-seed (ex. $500K) vs. a Series Seed (ex. $1-4M) vs. a Series A ($5-20M+) round in 2021.

A wealth of knowledge was shared by everybody in this panel. From a VC perspective, John Mannes highlighted the importance of being disciplined about your process and building momentum when it comes to fundraising.

Lindsey Mignano emphasized the importance of working with investors that are experienced in your industry, especially for newer entrepreneurs.

And Luigi Congedo reminded founders the importance of fundraising, selling, and hiring. “This is an ongoing effort, you cannot just wait the next six months to start those processes. The approach towards them will dramatically change and increase your success.”

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About Luigi Congedo 

Luigi Congedo is a Principal at BootstrapLabs, a leading Venture Capital firm based in Silicon Valley and focused on Applied Artificial Intelligence. Luigi is responsible for deal-flow, investments, and business development, and is actively involved in advising the portfolio company founders. He leads the organization of the annual Applied AI Conference, bringing together over 800 AI leaders. and is a frequent speaker and mentor at different startup programs and events.

Prior to BootstrapLabs, Luigi worked at Samsung, AngelHack and RadiumOne. He also founded a pharmaceutical e-commerce company in Italy, lovesano.it. Born in Napoli, Luigi graduated from the University of Napoli Federico II with a B.S in Economics. He earned his Masters Degree in International Business at Hult International Business School in San Francisco and Shanghai. Luigi has lived in Italy, Spain, the UK, Ireland, and China during his career, and is now based in Silicon Valley. In 2018 he was selected as a Forbes 30 Under 30 leader on the prestigious annual list of young visionaries and the leaders of tomorrow.

BootstrapLabs is pleased to share that our portfolio company Hayden AI Secures $4.5M funding round which brings the company’s total funding to $9.5 million, including a $5 million seed round from last year. The new funding will go towards accelerating the development and delivery of AI-powered solutions aimed at enabling governments to achieve their goals of safer streets, equitable transportation, and efficient urban mobility. Other participants in the round are MVP Partners, UC Berkeley’s Strawberry Creek Ventures, e.Republic, and Autotech Ventures.

Hayden AI’s platform provides cities with the ability to automate the gathering of real-time data using advanced computer vision and artificial intelligence to create a Digital Twin and knowledge graph of a city’s streets and curbs and the events that take place there.

Hayden AI has been a BootstrapLabs portfolio company since 2020.

“We are thrilled to have investors that bring significant expertise and comprehensive industry knowledge, which is invaluable as we continue to empower smart cities around the world to end traffic-related fatalities and severe injuries while providing safe and equitable mobility for all.”

– Chris Carson, Co-Founder and CEO of Hayden AI

“Smart technologies are driving the creation of safer cities and Hayden AI is at the forefront of this revolution,”

– Nicolai Wadstrom, Founder, CEO, and General Partner at BootstrapLabs

 

You can read the full press release below:

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., May 17, 2021 /PRNewswire/ — Hayden AI Technologies, Inc. (“Hayden AI”), a leading smart city solutions provider, today announced the closing of a $4.5 million funding round led by BootstrapLabs, an early-stage Silicon Valley venture capital firm focused on Applied Artificial Intelligence. Read More.

The BootstrapLabs Applied Artificial Intelligence Conference 2019 #AAI19 brought together the brightest and most experienced experts in the field of AI for an immersive day of learning, discussion, and connection.

On BootstrapWorks we have released the videos from this past conference to relive the moments and spread the knowledge around the diverse topics covered by our experts on stage. 

BootstrapLabs has built a community of more than 40,000 people from over 60 countries who care about applying Artificial Intelligence to solve the hardest problems of our society.

Get access to practical wisdom on Applied AI methodologies and take advantage of AI’s powerful potential, sign up here to receive the videos directly into your inbox. 

By 2050, world population is projected to reach over 9 billion, increasing the demand for food dramatically. In this session, panelists Walter Robb, former Co-CEO of Whole Foods, and Adam Greenberg, CEO of iUNU, discuss how to create and incentivize a healthier, more transparent, and more efficient food supply through controlled environment agriculture (CEA), computer vision, precision agriculture, and other emerging AI applications.

Moderator: Benjamin Levy, Co-Founder, BootstrapLabs

Panelists: Adam Greenberg, Founder & CEO, iUNU; Walter Robb, Principal, Stonewall Robb Advisors, Entrepreneur & Former Co-CEO, Whole Foods Market

Some of the key takeaways from the session are:

• We have come to a great inflection point with increased disruption, change and opportunity in food and agriculture.
• Currently we are still losing 40% of food we produce and we are using 5 pounds of soil for every pound of food which means that we are burning through our soil.
• On the other side, the use of synthetic chemicals (pesticides, fertilizers) will be outperformed by botanicals and consumers are increasingly aware that the quality of food matters.
• Technology today helps to serve the customer the way they want to be served and the companies which take a tech-forward approach in their go-to-market strategy succeed.
• Challenges in agriculture today:
  • Farmers can lose 20-30% of plants because they do not know where they are.
  • 63% of growers are above 50 years old but replenish rate is only at 2-3% per year which means knowledge and working power gets lost.
• The question is how to scale a grower. Currently, they spend between 5-10% a day using their knowledge to solve problems. By bringing the problem to them, they can focus on these issues 60-80% of their time.
• iUnu is offering an automated inventory tracking software with robotic vision and AI to identify issues and allow forecasting. This way they provide value and context to producers (who often are not tech savvy) with an easy to use system.
• Future developments:
  • The number of farms in the US is down, but organic and indoor farming is growing.
  • Soy-based proteins could be up to 30% of the market.
  • More biodiversity will be discovered in the next world of food while today, 75% of our food is based on 12 plants and 5 animals.
  • Food will be a big part of the healthcare because health and nutrition is individually based on your biome and can now be tailored with modern technology.
  • Soon stores will be able to recognize consumers and tailor real-time offers if the consumer gives permission.
• Other current AI developments include tracking insects to give recommendations how to treat pests more efficiently as well as assessing the combination of foods to figure out the unintended consequences of putting foods together.

About Ben Levy:
Prior to BootstrapLabs, Ben Levy was a repeat entrepreneur who launched, built, and exited two startups in the financial technology space, Praedea Solution and InsideVenture. He was also a Technology, Media, and Telecom Investment Banker who advised startup founders and CEOs of Fortune 500 companies on corporate strategy, financing, and M&A. Ben helped his clients raise over $300M from institutional investors and close over $5B in M&A transactions. Ben is a frequent keynote and panel speaker on innovation, technology investing, entrepreneurship, AI, and globalization in the US, Europe, and Asia.

About Adam Greenberg:
Adam Greenberg has a passion for solving fundamental global challenges and brings a clear vision of how iUNU will be a major player in that solution. Adam grew up with a love for agriculture through the lens of his botanist father. He founded iUNU in 2013 as he saw how precision agriculture could revolutionize food production. Adam earned his degrees in Finance and Entrepreneurship from the University of Washington. He spent two years at Amazon, but ultimately found his passion in leading innovation. Adam enjoys presenting for organizations such as the U.S. Farm Bureau, Indoor AgCon, Orange telecommunications and many more.

About Walter Robb:
Former Co-CEO of Whole Foods Market Walter Robb has a long and varied entrepreneurial history, ranging from natural food retailer to farmer to consultant. Robb joined Whole Foods Market in 1991 and was named co-CEO in 2010, at which time he joined the Whole Foods Market Board of Directors. In 2017, Robb transitioned his focus to his role as an advocate for greater food access in underserved communities, serving as Chairman of the Board for Whole Kids Foundation and Whole Cities Foundation. Robb is an Executive in Residence at S2G Ventures and serves on the Board of Directors for Union Square Hospitality Group, The Container Store, FoodMaven, HeatGenie and Apeel Sciences.

The BootstrapLabs Applied Artificial Intelligence Conference 2019 #AAI19 brought together the brightest and most experienced experts in the field of AI for an immersive day of learning, discussion, and connection.

On BootstrapWorks we have released the videos from this past conference to relive the moments and spread the knowledge around the diverse topics covered by our experts on stage. 

BootstrapLabs has built a community of more than 40,000 people from over 60 countries who care about applying Artificial Intelligence to solve the hardest problems of our society.

Get access to practical wisdom on Applied AI methodologies and take advantage of AI’s powerful potential, sign up here to receive the videos directly into your inbox. 

Construction, manufacturing, and industrial design projects are often far too complex to be effectively managed by people. It is in this capacity that AI is uniquely suited to help. This keynote and fireside chat brings together Matt Man, Co-Founder and CEO of Indus.ai, and Mike Haley, Senior Director of AI and Robotics at Autodesk. They will discuss how to leverage AI’s capacity for synthesizing real-time data in support of managing, predicting, and optimizing for safety, quality, productivity, and efficiency within the construction and manufacturing industries.

Presenter: Matt Man, Founder & CEO, indus.ai

Panelist: Mike Haley, Senior Director of AI & Robotics, Autodesk

Some of the key takeaways from the session are:

• Choosing the right problem to solve with AI is as important as the problem.
• Manufacturing ($31T), real estate & construction ($25T) and industrial (mining, agriculture, utilities etc.) ($15) are trillion dollar markets for next generation services. Opportunities for AI include better planning and scheduling, safer environments, higher productivity, less waste and more agility and resilience.
• Try to look at a problem with a limited amount of failure in the system still provides high value (e.g. 97% of accuracy). Automate existing processes – then take a look where there are new capabilities to do things differently.
• Monitoring construction sites nowadays is still mostly done via pen and paper and a few people on site. This is a reason why 90% of construction projects over-budget by 80% which represents $10T of waste.
• Indus.ai created a tool for the smart construction site, where computer vision and ML/AI deliver actionable insights on progress tracking, worker metrics, truck/materials arrivals and overall site production analytics. This provides 10x of the normal visibility, and helps avoiding mistakes early, checking progress and giving insight on how to build a much better plan.
• Traditionally manufacturers and designers were separated from each other, but with large amounts of data and AI one can incorporate the process how something is built and used as well as the used materials and supply chains into the design process to create an optimal design that flows right into the process of manufacturing and construction.
• Generative design explores a design with thousands of permutations e.g. on the different forces that impact a seatbelt bracket. This way, a car company designed a new bracket that uses 30% less materials and is 40% lighter.
• Autodesk’s BrickBot project consists of an adaptive robot that learns how to build Lego from a physics and visual simulator that simulates what the camera and torque sensor on the arm will feel. This way it can go through a million iterations in a few hours so when it actually starts building, it already knows what to do.
• Future outlook:
  • Imagine if construction sites had three adaptable machines instead of hundreds of specialists – it would be much more flexible, safe and efficient.
  • Today, most AI is very limited on an area of expertise – there is no AI that is applied at the systems level because it is quite complex with high levels of freedom. The only way to be efficient is to understand the system – evolving AI to gain to that level of understanding is a vision with tremendous reward.

About Matt Man:
Matt Man is the founder and CEO of indus.ai, a construction intelligence company. Before indus.ai, Matt co-founded a mobile technology company GreenOwl Mobile and deployed 40+ smart city products in over 25 cities, worldwide. GreenOwl Mobile was acquired by one of the largest architecture and design technology firms in the world, IBI Group. Matt has specialized in deploying technology to Enterprise and Industrial markets for 20 years and has developed a deep understanding of the challenges operating in the industrial environments. His experience with AI was first developed at the University of Toronto, where he pioneered his first neural network to translate sign language to spoken words 25 years ago.

About Mike Haley:
Mike leads the Machine Intelligence group at Autodesk Research where they identify, evaluate, and develop disruptive technologies that improve the practice of imagining, designing, and creating a better world. His team combines research, development, and user experience in coupled iterative cycles to develop new products and foundational technology. For the last several years Mike’s team has been focused on bringing geometric shape analysis and large scale machine learning techniques to 3D design information with the intent to make software a true partner in the design process.

Formerly, Mike led the move of Autodesk products from the desktop to the cloud by driving the adoption of scalable distributed compute and data technology. Prior to joining Autodesk, Mike performed research and product development in the fields of volumetric graphics, distributed multimedia, computer vision, and embedded systems. He is drawn to areas where he can combine his 25 years of experience in computer graphics, distributed systems, and mathematical analysis. Mike holds an MS in computer science from the University of Cape Town, South Africa.

The BootstrapLabs Applied Artificial Intelligence Conference 2019 #AAI19 brought together the brightest and most experienced experts in the field of AI for an immersive day of learning, discussion, and connection.

On BootstrapWorks we have released the videos from this past conference to relive the moments and spread the knowledge around the diverse topics covered by our experts on stage. 

BootstrapLabs has built a community of more than 40,000 people from over 60 countries who care about applying Artificial Intelligence to solve the hardest problems of our society.

Get access to practical wisdom on Applied AI methodologies and take advantage of AI’s powerful potential, sign up here to receive the videos directly into your inbox. 

Though Applied AI is widely known for its role in facial recognition and self-driving technology, few people think of AI when they think of computer networks. As computer networks become increasingly complex, encrypted, and under attack, machine learning and applied AI is well situated to support keeping networks safe while maintaining privacy. From finding malware in encrypted traffic without decrypting the traffic to moving from Cloud-based ML to distributing ML across Edge and Cloud, applying ML and AI to computer networks can lead to improved scalability, cost, and privacy.  Join VP and CTO of Cisco’s Enterprise Networking Business, John Apostolopoulos, as he discusses the next generation of computer networking.

Speaker: John Apostolopoulos, VP/CTO of Enterprise Networking, Lab Director of Innovation Labs, Cisco

Some of the key takeaways from the session are:

• Cisco uses AI to:
  • count people to automate processes in buildings or to display individual names in video-conferencing.
  • detect and classify irregular noises to propose muting audio during video calls.
  • identify problems in large networks and propose solutions.
  • identify which devices are on the network to increase efficiencies, reliability and security.
  • identify malware in end-to-end-encrypted traffic without requiring decryption.
• Reasons for moving AI processes to the edge of the network (instead of in the cloud or at the client side):
  • In video analytics, sensors create plenty of data even with compression
  • Cloud-based ML has issues with bandwidth, latency and privacy. If we move execution and learning to the edge we gain reduced bandwidth, improved scaling, lower latency and privacy-preserved learning. The question that many institutions research is how we can aggregate learning across multiple edges.
• Cisco achieved privacy-preserved learning with AI at the edge by generating synthetic images of people that captured the key attributes needed by the AI agent but preserved the privacy by anonymizing the images.
• We need more of these tools that analyze if a system successfully preserves privacy. If we jointly design networking and AI carefully together, we can solve a lot of current issues and provide the base for new technologies like AR/VR, autonomous vehicles, blockchain and smart cities.

About John Apostolopoulos:
As VP and CTO of Cisco’s Enterprise Networking Business, John Apostolopoulos is designing the next generation of computer networking. His work includes wireless (from WiFi to 5G), Internet of Things, multimedia networking, visual analytics, and machine learning. John is an IEEE Fellow and was named “one of the world’s top 100 young innovators” by MIT Technology Review, and contributed to the US Digital TV Standard (Engineering Emmy 1997). He published over 100 papers, receiving 5 best paper awards, and about 75 granted patents. John was a Consulting Associate Professor at Stanford and received his B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. from MIT.

The BootstrapLabs Applied Artificial Intelligence Conference 2019 #AAI19 brought together the brightest and most experienced experts in the field of AI for an immersive day of learning, discussion, and connection.

On BootstrapWorks we have released the videos from this past conference to relive the moments and spread the knowledge around the diverse topics covered by our experts on stage. 

BootstrapLabs has built a community of more than 40,000 people from over 60 countries who care about applying Artificial Intelligence to solve the hardest problems of our society.

Get access to practical wisdom on Applied AI methodologies and take advantage of AI’s powerful potential, sign up here to receive the videos directly into your inbox. 

Companies are under tremendous pressure to adopt AI technology across their organizations in order to stay competitive, with the majority of companies needing to re-invent their core products and services using proprietary AI technology instead of off-the-shelf SaaS solutions. Moderator Jaime Fitzgibbon, Innovation Strategist at Booz Allen Hamilton, leads a conversation with panelists Rahul Sachdev, Co-Founder and CEO of Fortella; Alex Holub, CEO of Vidora; Vidya Raman, Director of Product Management and ML at Cloudera; and Bahman Bahmani, Director of Data Science at Rakuten, about best practices and design principles for Enterprise AI. Panelists address how to make AI productivity gains accessible to as many people as possible across an organization, how to increase adoption of AI within an organization, and how to innovate faster by making the development process of AI for enterprise more inclusive of non-data scientists.

Moderator: Jaime Fitzgibbon, Innovation Strategist, Booz Allen Hamilton

Panelists: Rahul Sachdev, Co-Founder & CEO, Fortella; Alex Holub, CEO, Vidora; Vidya Raman, Director of Product Management & ML, Cloudera; Bahman Bahmani, Director of Data Science, Rakuten

Some of the key takeaways from the session are:

• AI councils in companies have three main mandates:
  • Ensure a common understanding about AI and ML within the organization.
  • Create a tabular layout where investments in ML are being made and which represent the highest ROI.
  • Sharing case studies between business units and organizations.
• Three main areas where value can be made with the help of AI in enterprises:
  • Operational excellence
  • Product leadership
  • Customer intimacy
• Implementing AI: Data is the foundation of AI – make sure you have the right clean data pipeline into a centralized location and start small and collaborate early to tailor the data collection to the AI tool.
• Regulation is important to preserve privacy and the option to delete PII needs to be built in the data structure, while it is also a driver for more automation in the data analytics process.
• Enabling the AI tool user to override predictions or decisions is key for critical applications to give quality control over the system.
• Three sources of scale at Rakuten:
  • Automation in DevOps to forward the full CI/CD pipeline from development to deployment.
  • Outsource data wrangling to junior positions which creates a good career path and frees the schedule for the data scientist who can focus on doing their most productive work.
  • Building and managing a globally distributed team.
• The mindset of building everything in-house gets in the way of broader adoption of AI because talent is scarce and automation tools like Vidora help to solve time-consuming processes like data wrangling and modeling, enabling data scientists to focus on the problem itself.
• Venture capital investment increased from $4B in 2016 to $10B in 2018 which produced many tools that can be utilized rather than building everything in-house.
• Open source will be a tremendous opportunity for companies to experiment before fully committing and machine learning enables people to do more while opening up time for creativity.

About Jaime Fitzgibbon:
Jaime Fitzgibbon is Senior Associate at technology strategy consultancy Booz Allen Hamilton. Over the past 3 years, she has been building an innovation office focused on tracking technology trends and emerging tech solutions for client’s toughest mission challenges. She serves as a mentor to start-ups, has spoken and written articles on the core elements for building a viable innovation ecosystem, and developed the classroom of the future strategy for a local school. She serves on the board of the German School of San Francisco as well as other community organizations’ advisory councils.

About Rahul Sachdev:
Rahul Sachdev is the co-founder and CEO of Fortella – an AI-based Revenue Driven Marketing software company. He is a technology executive with experience in marketing, CRM and social domains. Prior to Fortella, Rahul served as the CEO of Get Satisfaction, an online community platform for marketing and customer support. Earlier Rahul was the head of content sharing and workplace products at LinkedIn, and General Manager of the Communications, Media & Energy product at Siebel Systems. Rahul holds an MBA from the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business and a BSc with Honors in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from Loughborough University (UK).

About Alex Holub:
Alex Holub studied artificial intelligence throughout his academic career at Cornell University and during his Ph.D at Caltech. He has published over 15 academic papers and holds numerous patents in the areas of machine learning, computer vision, and artificial intelligence. Prior to co-founding Vidora, Alex was a technical and product management lead at Ooyala.

About Vidya Raman:
Together with different product teams, Vidya Raman has built and grown enterprise businesses as a product leader in several industry verticals ranging from Telecom, Healthcare, Energy and IoT. Most recently, she led product management for Cloudera’s AI platform, where she was responsible for making AI at scale a reality for customers spanning industries such as autonomous driving, biotech, banking to governments. Prior experience includes eMeter (Sequoia-funded, acquired by Siemens), Silver Spring (Kleiner funded and IPO exit), Medtronic (healthcare). Currently she is an early-stage venture investor.

About Bahman Bahmani:
Bahman Bahmani is a Director of Data Science at Rakuten (the 7th largest internet company in the world), managing an AI organization with engineering and data science managers, data scientists, machine learning engineers, and data engineers, globally distributed across 3 continents and in charge of the end-to-end AI systems behind the Rakuten Intelligence suite of products. Bahman has built and managed engineering and data science teams across industry, academia, and the public sector in areas including digital advertising, consumer web, cybersecurity, and non-profit fundraising, where he has consistently delivered substantial business value. He has also designed and taught courses, led an interdisciplinary research lab, and advised several theses in the Computer Science department at Stanford University, where he also did his own PhD focused on large-scale algorithms and machine learning, topics on which he is a well-published author.

On March 10th, Luigi was featured on Forbes Italia as one of the young emerging venture capitalists of artificial intelligence in Silicon Valley. Below you can find an extract of Luigi’s interview:

“Your work will fill a large part of your life and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you think is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle for it. As with all matters of the heart, you will know when you find it ”. So believed Steve Jobs, who was able to inspire many entrepreneurs and visionaries like him. Luigi Congedo , 31, venture capitalist of BootstrapLabs , arrived in Silicon Valley at a very young age, becoming one of the 30 under 30s of Forbes Italia for 2018. “Steve Jobs was the first great entrepreneur, inventor and visionary I was inspired by.” […]

“He comes from Naples.”

“I consider myself very lucky to have been born in Naples. My hometown has a great cultural and soul wealth. This has allowed me to be a social and positive person, qualities that have helped me to be successful.” […]

“Do you think AI can also be dangerous?”

“It is up to us – society, politicians and entrepreneurs – to decide how to use technology and innovation. BootstrapLabs philosophy is to choose investments that create long-term utility and vertical solutions in specific industries, such as healthcare, logistics, agriculture, energy, and smart government.” […]

“How has Covid-19 changed the world of investments?”

“Our core investment theses have not changed, but we have seen a strong acceleration of many tech trends. The coronavirus has caused an acceleration of digital transformation on a global scale and in all sectors.” […]

“What are the most interesting sectors in the future?”

“I think the use of artificial intelligence is among the most promising trends. Among the sectors I look at with great interest there are cybersecurity, healthcare and climate.” […]

Below you can read the full press release:

MILANO, Italy, Mar. 10, 2021 /Forbes/ — La storia di Luigi Congedo, il giovane napoletano diventato venture capitalist dell’intelligenza artificiale nella Silicon Valley. Read More.