Business Insider profiles 12 AI startups that their panel of venture capitalists considers likely to succeed in 2019.
These startups fall into three categories:
A) Enterprise apps: Appzen (auditing), Atrium (legal), FortressIQ (processes), Guru (knowledge management), People.ai (sales)
B) Robots: Farmwise (tractor), 6 River Systems (warehouse), Shield.ai (drones in risky places)
C) Others: Superhuman (email app), SambaNova (chips), Transfix (marketplace for trucking)
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Of these, I think group B (robots) is the most promising. The self-driving technology is particularly well suited in these settings (farms, warehouses) in which traffic control can be fully centralized. In some cases, the accuracy required is not too high, e.g. the tractor that differentiates weed from not weed needs only be moderately accurate.
The drone company - it's not clear where the AI is.
In Group A, I like Appzen, which uses AI to detect fraud in expense reports. It's clearly possible, and has a business model - although the model is about cost control rather than revenue growth.
Guru, People.ai, and FortressIQ are applications that have current solutions, and it's not easy to see from a brief description how they will be better. Knowledge management and process streamlining are problems that are around forever, and never get solved.
Atrium for legal documents is too vague a concept to judge.
Superhuman, the new email interface, can be nice but Gmail killed the market for email software by giving it away free. AI is likely just a small part of this offering. I must say I like the new Gmail predictive typing feature. On the other hand, Gmail's predictive classification of emails to tabs continues to underwhelm after years of training.
SambaNova has a great team, but no details on what they are really doing. Transfix, the marketplace connecting truckers and loads, sounds promising - if only because this problem has been studied for a long time.
At the end of the year, we can come back and see how these companies performed.
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