NavTrac – Applied AI and Logistics 

The size of the global logistics industry is estimated at approximately $10 trillion annually, representing approximately 10% of the global GDP. Like many other traditional industries, transportation and logistics is confronting immense challenges and changes.

BootstrapLabs has been tracking this industry and we believe that the growth of collaboration, digitalization and standardization of shipments, labeling, and systems will have a large impact here. Currently, global supply chain infrastructure is fragmented, complex and still mostly analog. Incumbents in the industry have limited access to and understanding of digital technology.

Companies like NavTrac are quickly transforming the industry by automating data and tracking by integrating AI and computer vision.

Starting with Container Yard Management, NavTrac has created the first digital platform of its kind to manage the data and track containers from the point a container arrives on the shipment dock or yard. The company has already successfully deployed its AI system to some of the largest players in the market and revenues are now growing 20% MoM.

NavTrac has been a BootstrapLabs portfolio company since 2019.

John Daniels is Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder at NavTrac. He is responsible for driving the vision of the company, more than doubling NavTrac’s revenues in the middle of the pandemic with some of the largest transportation and logistic players, as well as growing a team of super talented engineers and business development individuals. Prior to NavTrac, John was a research analyst covering the transportation sector. John has extensive experience utilizing satellite, unmanned aircraft systems and other alternative sensors to collect data in the industrial economy. John holds a BA from Columbia University.

Mihail Pivtoraiko is the Chief Technology Officer and Co-Founder at NavTrac. He is responsible for developing NavTrac’s high-performance machine vision software platform, with an accuracy rate of 99.7% and decreasing industry processing speed from days to minutes, and eventually seconds. Prior to NavTrac, Mihail completed his PhD at Carnegie Mellon University and postdoc at the GRASP lab at the University of Pennsylvania, under the guidance of the world-renowned robotics professor Vijay Kumar. Mihail previously worked at Intel Corp, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and at Lockheed Martin as part of the DARPA Robotics Challenge.

GetAccept – Applied AI and Enterprise Productivity

Historically there has been a perception that if an employee was not in the office, they were not working. This year’s pandemic has forced millions of companies across the globe to shut down their offices and ask their employees to work remotely. Yet, contrary to expectations, many organizations, large and small, have experienced a boost in productivity, primarily driven by the adoption of new software technologies.

Stocks from enterprise productivity software companies such as Zoom (ZM +487%), Docusign (DOCU +205%), Okta (OKTA +113%), and Slack Technologies (WORK +89%) have displayed impressive gains this year – and reflect a clear signal that economies and their businesses have not stopped working, but transformed into a more digital and decentralized enterprise model. The worldwide acceleration of this digital transformation is in turn creating an explosion of new data that creates exciting new opportunities for automation and artificial intelligence applications.

For the past five years, BootstrapLabs has been investing in AI applications that are accelerating Enterprise Productivity and defining the Future of Work. One of our portfolio companies – GetAccept – has been helping companies accelerate their sales throughout the pandemic, and recently raised a $20M Series B round led by Bessemer Venture Partners, with participation from existing investors such as BootstrapLabs, DN Capital and Y Combinator.

GetAccept helps small and medium-sized businesses, and their sales reps, close more deals remotely by enabling, prioritizing, and automating more personalized, engaging, and convenient asynchronous sales communication and contract execution.

GetAccept has been a BootstrapLabs portfolio company since 2017.

Samir Smajic is co-founder and CEO at GetAccept. He has more than 10 years of experience in CRM solutions. He has prior experience working with co-founders at Lime Technologies AB. Samir received a Master of Science in Mechanical Engineering at Lund University.

Jonas Blanck is co-founder and CTO at GetAccept. Jonas prior served as CTO and worked for over 10 years in email marketing and has developed solutions for email designing, deliverability enhancement and advanced email marketing. Jonas received a Bachelors of Science in Computer Science at Lund Institute of Technology.

Carl Carell is co-founder and CSO at GetAccept. Carl co-founded Adsensus Denmark and helped the company to expand across Norwegian, Finnish, and Danish markets. He has over 10 years of experience in Sales & Marketing. Mr Carell received a Bachelors of Science in Business Administration concentration in Finance at Lund University.

Mathias Thulin is co-founder at GetAccept. Mathias founded Apsis ProspectEye, one of the most successful lead generation and marketing automation platforms in the Nordic countries. He has over 10 years of experience in Sales & Marketing. Mathias received a Master of Science in Engineering and Industrial Management at Lund University. He was awarded Entrepreneur of the year in Malmö 2020 – Tillväxt Malmö.

Applied AI and Healthcare: Myia Health developed an intelligent patient monitoring platform to better support patients with chronic conditions, a $38Bn industry. 

International Data Corporation (IDC) estimates that by 2020, over 2,300 exabytes (one billion gigabytes) of clinically-relevant data we will be generated, with the vast majority coming from non-clinical settings such as personal medical sensors. Thanks to its proprietary AI technology, Myia Health not only makes this data available to clinicians, but is also capable of providing key insights about the current and future health of patients, facilitating richer and personalized patient-clinician dialogue, increasing compliance, and allowing for better care-planning.

Myia Health’s intelligent patient monitoring platform supports patients with chronic conditions such as heart failure, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), diabetes, and hypertension, a $38 billion industry in 2019, that is expected to surge to $130 billion by 2025. Myia’s partnership with Mercy Virtual is poised to revolutionize the industry and become a key standard of care in the upcoming “outcome based” healthcare system.

Myia uses AI technology to predict patient health status and augment the power of frontline clinicians with levels of patient insights that were previously inaccessible.

Myia Health has been a BootstrapLabs portfolio company since 2018.

Simon MacGibbon is co-founder and CEO at Myia Health. Simon has over 20 years of experience using technology to drive transformational industry change, in both consumer and complex B2B settings. Prior to co-founding Myia Health, Simon co-founded the Boston Consulting Group’s Digital Ventures business, where he led teams responsible for imagining, building, and investing in data-driven technology platforms to help some of the world’s most influential companies innovate with startup-like speed. Formerly, Simon was an Associate Partner at McKinsey & Co. and a leader in the systems integration area at IBM Global Services. He has a BSc from Otago University in New Zealand and a BA (Hons) in Applied and Industrial Psychology from the University of Canterbury.

Bryan Smith is co-founder and CTO at Myia Health. Bryan is a multidisciplinary executive leader applying advanced analytics, machine learning, and interactive data visualization methods to help organizations and individuals maximize the value of their data as an asset. He has proven ability to function as a key individual contributor as well as an executive leader, skilled at identifying the optimal balance between those functions as required by each unique role. Brian is an excellent communicator, able to convey complex ideas to client executives as well as speak the language of technical team members. He received a Bachelor’s of Science in Neuroscience and Chemistry at University of Southern California, and a Ph.D. in Neuroscience at Caltech.

Sam Rawstorne is co-founder and COO at Myia Health. Sam has over 20 years of experience growing teams and launching companies. He has extensive experience in Recruiting, HR. EIR at BootstrapLabs and BCG Digital Ventures. He received a Bachelor of Arts Hons, at the University of the Arts London.

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 our 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. 

Together, the lack of attribution models, an integrated identity, and the complexity of establishing global privacy and ethical standards within the core building blocks of the Internet pose a critical threat to the very fabric of our modern society. Moderator Daniel Riedel, Founder and CEO of New Context, and panelists Erin Kenneally of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Herb Kelsey of Quantum Vault, Jason Hoffman of MobileEdgeX, and Jonathan Ward of Atlas Organization discuss how AI has contributed to the exacerbation of state actors, terrorist organizations, and criminals’ political and ideologically motivated use of the internet for financial gain. The panelists also explore how AI presents an opportunity to alleviate that threat by strengthening our existing digital infrastructures and creating stronger platforms for the future stability, economic prosperity, and security of our society, companies, and citizens.

Moderator: Daniel Riedel, Founder & CEO, New Context

Panelists: Erin Kenneally, Portfolio Manager, Cyber Security Division, Science & Technology, U.S. Department of Homeland Security; Herb Kelsey, Founder & CEO, Quantum Vault Inc.; Jonathan Ward, Founder & CEO, Atlas Organization; Jason Hoffman, President & CEO of MobiledgeX.

Some of the key takeaways from the session are:

• Currently, we do not have a collective mental model for AI and risk. AI is forcing a conflation of rights as well as individual, company and state interests like privacy, free expression, security, critical infrastructures etc.
• AI is a tool and a strategy focused on optimization and care. It is very difficult to optimize something and thus important to have a strategy around how to optimize something and to understand all implications of that process.
• AI is used in scoring and recommender systems, news feeds and search results and for classification prediction (crime, health etc.) which bears certain risks.
• In a time of continuous accelerated change, it is important to go back to fundamental truths: The ability to generate unique insights via proprietary access to data is always advantageous.
• If the delta between our growing AI capabilities and our expectations (laws: privacy, data protection, human rights etc.) continues to grow, we have:
  • Inefficient avoidance of risk.
  • Increasing tensions between legitimate stakeholders.
  • Undermining of trust in our ordering forces (law, markets etc.).
• AI will break the internet, if:
  • It is in the hands of an attacker, allowing higher efficiencies in creating synthetic identities to simulate transactions, because this eliminates trust.
  • Automated social network behavior to influence politics as well as automated trolling or racist comments become the norm.
  • We fail to align our expectations with our capabilities.
• AI will save the internet, if:
  • We use it successfully to protect, care for and optimize membership in open and insecure networks like the internet.
• The pressure of the rise of China and its relationship with Russia on the liberal democratic world order will change everything on a geopolitical scale. We are going through two historical changes: Industry 4.0 and the rise of major-nation states with heated competition between two major world powers for the first time since the cold war. China as a leading investor in AI has a national AI strategy that aims to be the undisputed world leader by 2030 which shows the nature of this arms race. The alignment of state and company goals in China will lead to continued global confrontation of multinational companies with emerging champions from an authoritarian system.

About Daniel Riedel:
Daniel Riedel, the CEO of New Context, is an innovator in data security for highly regulated industries. He is a trusted authority in data security for the industrial internet, speaking before the US Senate Committee on Energy & Natural Resources, OASIS‘s Borderless Cyber and Johns Hopkins IACD, and has been published in the Washington Post, Federal Times, Wired and Dark Reading. Riedel has over 20 years of expertise building secure and scalable technologies, products and companies.

About Erin Kenneally:
Erin Kenneally is Program Manager in the Cyber Security Division of the U.S. Dept of Homeland Security, Science & Technology Directorate. Her portfolio comprises cybersecurity research infrastructure, privacy, security economics, and technology ethics. She manages the IMPACT, CYRIE, and Data Privacy programs. Erin is Founder and CEO of Elchemy, Inc., and served as Technology-Law Specialist at the International Computer Science Institute, Center for Internet Data Analysis and Center for Evidence-based Security Research at the University of California, San Diego. Erin is a licensed Attorney specializing in information technology law, including privacy technology, data protection, AI ethics and legal risk, trusted information sharing, and technology policy.

About Herb Kelsey:
Herb Kelsey’s time as Chief Architect for NSA/CSS LSI and at IBM as Federal CTO for cybersecurity heavily influenced his 25-year career. At NSA, he learned to engineer for global scale and secure systems against ruthless villains. IBM taught him product management and enterprise integration. He’s deployed these skills for corporations, our country, and our allies. Most notably, as the head of computation for U.S. National Counter-Terrorism Center (NCTC), the highest volume, most secure, yet heavily attacked analytic fusion center in the world. His passion is making the global, networked, world safe for transactions, private information, intellectual property and children.

About Jonathan Ward:
Dr. Jonathan Ward is the Founder of Atlas Organization, a DC and NY based consultancy focused on the rise of India and China, and US-China global competition. He is the author of China’s Vision of Victory, about Chinese global strategy and what America must do to respond. From travels in Tibet and across the South China Sea, to accessing restricted Communist Party archives, to consulting for the U.S. Department of Defense and Fortune 500 companies, Dr. Ward has brought the experience of a traveler and scholar, and the insight of a strategy consultant to one challenge: what does China want, how will it try to get it, and what should America do?

About Jason Hoffman:
Jason Hoffman is the President and CEO of MobiledgeX, a company focusing on edge computing and founded by Deutsche Telekom. Previously he was a CTO at Ericsson AB and was P&L responsible for their cloud and datacenter infrastructure business. While at Ericsson his group created the world’s first hyperscale, disaggregated system and led the market in the modernization of telecom infrastructure. Prior to Ericsson, he was a founder and the CTO at Joyent (now owned by Samsung), a pioneering high-performance cloud IaaS and software provider, where he ran product, engineering, operations, and commercial management for a decade.

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 our 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. 

AI is a critical tool for using observed data to make and predict decisions. While most industries work with curated data, transportation is a different situation: self-driving cars rely on volumes of real-time information. AEye chief scientist Dr. Allan Steinhardt discusses the role of AI in abstracting and extracting the right information from a car’s environment, including how to deal with the influx of data in vehicle autonomy and ADAS. Additionally, he explores the role of transportation AI in smart highways and how smart cities with next-generation wireless (5G) will impact transportation AI trends.

Speaker: Dr. Allan Steinhardt, Chief Scientist, AEye

Some of the key takeaways from the session are:

• If you look at the individual components of a system you learn nothing, it is important to understand the overlaying complex adaptive systems.
• The mathematics of understanding complex adaptive systems is similar to mathematics of quantum theory.
• If we think about AI for transportation in cities, we have to think like complex adaptive systems with all the different layers of meaning that intersect in very complex ways: Merging the different tribes of car makers, transportation engineers and Perception/AI engineers and their respective areas of focus is important to understand the different layers around transportation AI.
• Signals from autonomous vehicle sensors are plotted in a point cloud, but the noise in the data can be used to identify road surface features, background light that is interfering with the laser etc.
• MIT students were able to utilize RF exhaust noise from various wireless signals as a radar beacon to track humans through walls.
• Massive amounts of RF bandwidth is being used for communication in transportation AI: One of six radars on a car might use 2 Gigahertz of bandwidth meaning that one car needs more bandwidth than dozens of cell-towers which is clearly not sustainable.
• Complex adaptive systems do brokering between layers and today there are many start-ups that provide various technologies for brokering of communication networks.
• Congestion represents a lot of wasted capital assets.
• The current data mindset is the more data, the better. AEye’s mindset however is described as the latest time of value: Navigating space-time obstacles safely because it is essential to make a decision immediately since there will not be a better decision later in any traffic situation. Therefore it is essential to increase the quality of the data capture process which can be modeled to focus only on key objects like the human brain.

About Allan Steinhardt:
Dr. Allan Steinhardt is among the world’s most widely esteemed defense scientists. An IEEE fellow, he is a sought-after expert on radar, missile defense, GMTI and space surveillance. He was Chief Scientist for DARPA, co-author of a book on adaptive radar, and assistant professor in Electrical Engineering and Applied Mathematics at Cornell University, where he researched sensor arrays and optimal detection capabilities. Allan also served as chief scientist at Booz Allen at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, and director of signal processing for the defense industry with BAE/Alphatech. He holds a bachelor’s in Mathematics, and graduate degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Colorado, Boulder.

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 our BootstrapWorks portal 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. 

Bookkeeping, accounting, and auditing are undergoing rapid changes, driven in large part by the ability to digitally automate tasks previously performed manually by humans. Machine Learning and AI are driving a shift across the entire industry with the technology already being adopted by firms and individuals at a rapid pace and low price point, enabling a shift from Cloud Accounting to Augmented Accounting. Cathrine Andersen, Co-Founder of Roger.ai, discusses how in addition to making humans up to 20x faster in the bookkeeping and reconciliation process, machines can find patterns and put large data sets into perspective in a way no auditor would ever be able.

Speaker: Cathrine Andersen, Co-founder & CEO, Roger.ai

Some of the key takeaways from the session are:

• Accountant and auditor jobs were predicted to be at high risk of being automated with the help of AI and since 2004, the number of FTEs in finance departments of large companies declined by 40%.
• 90% of accountants and bookkeepers agree that the future is rapidly approaching, but only 10% think of themselves as innovative and 8% think the industry is “future ready”.
• Areas of automation:
  • Day-to-day financial operations: Accounts receivable, Accounts Payable, Cash-flow management
  • Bookkeeping / Reconciliation
  • Compliance
  • Fraud detection / Prevention
  • Auditing
• Product examples:
  • Roger.ai automates all the steps along the way by scanning documents and following determined flows within the platform. This gives the accountant the responsibility of supervision with integrated audit trails and fraud detection flags.
  • Pleo facilitates expense reporting.
  • Other companies include YayPay, Chata.ai and Mindbridge.
• The accounting firms of the future will either include a few winners who create the next generation of AI/ML-driven accounting and auditing software OR existing companies will quickly adapt to automation tools in order to compete with major players and keep their clients.
• In order to adapt to that change, re-skilling is essential to enable accountants and bookkeepers to focus on tasks like supervising the technology.

About Cathrine Andersen:
Cathrine Andersen is the co-founder and CEO of Roger.ai, an accounting automation product used by over 1,000 businesses and accounting firms worldwide. Starting with accounts payable and bill pay, Roger is moving the accounting industry from the cloud toward augmented accounting – one big step at the time. Originally from Denmark, Cathrine moved to the Bay Area in 2014 when her first company Assemblage was acquired by Cisco. She holds 2 US patents and was named Founder of the Year in her home country in 2018.

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 our BootstrapWorks portal 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. 

The Global South is home to some of the fastest growing economies on the planet despite being crippled by a general lack of traditional infrastructure, trade frictions, political and currency risks, and corruption. And yet, the benefits far outweigh the risks of bringing the next billion people into the Global Economy. In fact, massive investments are already being made in infrastructure, healthcare, IT, and transportation by governments, NGOs, and foundations alike. In this mini keynote and fireside chat, Chris Hale of Kountable and Jonas Svensson of UNOPS discuss how AI can empower entrepreneurs in the region by accelerating their growth, job creation, and taxable income recognition.

Presenter: Christopher Hale, Founder & CEO, Kountable

Panelist: Jonas Svensson, Head of Global Innovation and Technology, UNOPS

Some of the key takeaways from the session are:

• The global south is a relatively new term that describes countries which are not high-income countries. They represent 5B+ people or 60% of the world population.
• Africa’s population will double by 2050 and by 2100, 80% of the world’s population will live in Africa and Asia.
• Entrepreneurs are engines of change in these emerging markets, but it is difficult to identify and analyze them and their behaviors.
• Kountable built a tech platform that organizes entrepreneur behaviors as they access global markets with the help of NLP, currency forecasting, behavioral scoring & feedback loops to learn what a good trader looks like and to optimize and train against that behavior.
• The UNOPS reach is $2B to invest globally, but to innovate inside such a large structure becomes difficult. Therefore, they invest in  innovation procurement from the private sector who are able to generate profits. The EU innovation procurement policy (2018) focuses on outcome and lifetime cost instead of upfront cost and usage which facilitates innovation.
• Today, there is a funding gap of $15T to reach the sustainable development goals for 2030, which represents tremendous business opportunities for the private sector. This allows co-development with the UN, where private companies are enabled to keep the IP for usage in other sectors.
• We need to make technology available and understandable by facilitating education to bridge the social gaps around the world: The motivational driver is not shareholder profit, but global change by bringing critical infrastructure to the fastest-growing markets in the world. For example, AI is used to analyze infrastructure, food waste and to predict extreme weather patterns to facilitate support.

About Christopher Hale:
Chris Hale is founder and CEO of Kountable, Inc., an SF-based start-up that combines data science, social capital and proven financial instruments to provide highly scalable financing solutions to underserved entrepreneurs in developing countries. Kountable creates a low-friction, cloud-based bridge between investors and a massive opportunity to finance the most promising and well-networked entrepreneurs in emerging economies. Chris also doubled headcount and grew assets under management almost six-fold as the COO of Perigon Wealth Management, one of 2014’s 50 fastest growing RIAs in the country, serving approximately 100 families and managing almost $1 billion in assets.

About Jonas Svensson:
Jonas Svensson is the Head of Global Innovation and Technology at UNOPS. The UNOPS Global Innovation and Technology program operates under the Social Impact Investing Initiative with the mission to facilitate innovation wherever it happens. Connecting with Global stakeholders who share the UN foundation values regarding sustainability and the understanding that Innovation happens everywhere UNOPS together with partners have created a toolkit providing Education, Incubation, Investment and Policy support.

Prior to the role with UNOPS Mr Svensson has worked within the startup industry for the past 20 years as founder, incubator manager, business consultant, investor, last as President for a Venture capital company headed out of Tokyo Japan. Mr Svensson holds a Master in Global Management from the University of Salford and is currently pursuing his PhD.