10 New Fascinating AI Startups
Dispatches from our first AI Demo Day last week
Last week, we kicked off New York Tech Week with an AI Demo Day - showcasing a group of incredible founders, selected from an open call for applications that was answered by startups from all over the world.
Read on to learn more about each of these exceptional early stage founders - and to see which one was awarded a $50,000 investment from Next Wave NYC.
Huge thanks to our event sponsor, Rho - the business banking platform with everything founders need to manage your company cash and scale your startup. Sign up and earn rewards for switching your operating account to Rho.
PRESENTING FOUNDERS
Jammy combines AI-driven personal coaching with tailored music recommendations to enhance social connectivity among Gen Z.
Founder & CEO Eric Davich previously founded Songza (acquired by Google) and was also an early team member of Amie Street, acquired by Amazon. While at Google, he was the global partner marketing lead ofr YouTube & Google Play Music, as well as a senior product marketing manager for Android, marketing to Gen Z. These experiences led to his insight that Gen Z could really benefit from app-based coaching and music recommendations to help ease their rampant levels of anxiety.
Glist makes transportation management & policy planning seamless, by delivering digestible roadway data and accurate predictive analytics leveraging artificial intelligence advancements.
Founder Andrew Nijmeh is a teenage phenom. He was an early software engineer at multiple other VC-backed startups and in pursuit of Glist, has raised some angel funding and secured proprietary access to traffic data sources to power his solution.
Rosette Health delivers an AI-enhanced patient engagement platform for maternity featuring human-in-the-loop oversight, reducing costs by educating patients on their health, minimizing expensive procedures, and serving as a digital safeguard.
The founders are incredibly well-suited for this space. Co-founder & CEO Gülin Yilmaz worked in product management at Meta, PayPal & a maternal health startup Carrum Health. She experienced firsthand challenges during throughout her own pregnancy and saw the opportunity for improved maternal health outcomes through AI-supported birth doula care. She then partnered with her CTO, who led teams in training large language learning models at Intel, emotion identification models at Amazon Alexa AI and who has 60 peer-reviewed publications & patents.
Path is an AI-powered career mentor and skills trainer designed to help individuals navigate the rapidly changing education-to-employment pipeline.
CEO Chandler Malone and his co-founder have both founded previous edtech startups with successful outcomes. Their experiences with young job-seeking cohorts led them to see the need for job applicants to have stronger skills training and career mentors - all of which can be provided in an automated but highly relevant and customized way through Path.
Workplace AI is “game film” for managers, leaders, sales, customer support, and knowledge workers - a collective of AI-driven Performance IP to give employees rapid feedback, insights, and actions to improve business outcomes.
Founder & CEO Paul Allen, who previous founded Ancestry.com, showcased how Workplace AI goes beyond the typical meeting transcription service by leveraging a growing library of partner-driven modules that can provide more specific ratings and recommendations. For example, he had modules that rated his pitch for an angel investor audience vs a VC audience, and modules that can coach people on their performance based on Eric Ries’ Lean Startup methodology or Stephen M. R. Covey’s leadership principles.
Odyssey is building the AI and compute infrastructure for space starting with AI for GEOINT and scaling to orbit from there, aka custom vertically-integrated space supercomputers.
Founder Abood Hannoon shared a compelling vision for building computing power in outer space - starting by using visual computation for earth observation. This one was quite literally “out there” but Abood’s experience in ML, electrical and aerospace engineering makes him the right fit.
DeepLeads is building a superhuman AI to automate B2B sales.
Co-Founder Qingchen Wang showed how DeepLeads can build a list of thousands of strong prospects within a few seconds for any B2B sales team, a task that would typically take weeks of research. The magic is in the business knowledge foundational model that they built from scratch, which has a fundamental understanding of business knowledge far beyond any generic LLM.
CAPSULE -- the winner of the night -- earned a $50k investment from Next Wave NYC!
CAPSULE is Shazam for shopping – its cutting-edge vision AI outperforms visual search giants like Google and Pinterest and enables users to go from inspiration to purchase in under a minute.
Co-Founder & CEO Michele Van Ruiten also demonstrated CAPSULE’s image-based advertising model on its platform, enabling brands to advertise their goods based on visual likeness rather than by keyword. Her extensive experience in ecommerce (StitchFix, The Yes) led her to see the problem and the opportunity enabled by recent innovations in visual computation.
HONORABLE MENTIONS
Though we only had time for 8 to present, these two were also awesome and worth noting!
pre.dev is your product management co-pilot - a platform to instantly translate product ideas into full project plans including - Software Architecture, Tech Stack, Statement of Work, Infinite Depth Development Plan, and UI Wireframes.
We help resellers automate the tedious process of identifying and listing used items for sale on secondhand marketplaces. Our proprietary tech reduces the time it takes for resellers to get an item listed by > 90%. We're working towards a future where shopping and selling secondhand is people's first choice.
Overall it was an awesome way for early stage investors - angel through seed - to check out some of the latest AI startups and see the breadth of solutions currently being built… and we’ve heard that several of our presenting startups have raised from investors they met that night.
Many thanks to our co-hosts at The Council (especially Shriya Nevatia, who put in many hours to pull this all together) and Next Wave NYC, especially GP Jesse Middleton, who sweetened the deal with the $50k investment commitment.
Stay tuned - we plan to hold more demo days soon! In the meantime, here are some of our upcoming events:
Inside: Techstars NYC Powered by J.P. Morgan - A fireside chat with Christine Lu Hong about the NYC based Techstars program.
Startup Bootcamp: How to make Founding Hires for your Startup (Co-Presented with Bamboo Crowd) - a virtual workshop for startup founders and operators looking to make their first full-time hires.
andrew is on fire!