Visual Data & AI Track Mental Health, Find New Materials & Empower Humans

Generating new, unknown materials via generative techniques is going to be a huge opportunity. New materials are going to be discovered on the scale of weeks in the coming decades, as opposed to the years it takes today.

Check out Matt Uyttendaele's keynote on material discovery.

Matt Uyttendaele is the director of the AI for Chemistry group at Meta and an Expert with us at LDV Capital. His group applies machine learning to material discovery for several applications: clean hydrogen, sorbents for direct air capture and next-generation displays.

Our LDV team is growing: Max Blacker joined us as an Analyst. He is intrigued by the intersection between sports and visual tech, as well as nutrition and visual tech. If you are building businesses powered by visual tech and AI in one of these domains, then please reach out to Max.

Amazing that our LDV Community has been helping each other succeed for over 12 years! Check out a few photos from our most recent Happy Hour event in New York.

FEATURED PORTFOLIO COMPANY: EARKICK

Earkick is a personal AI chatbot, also known as Panda, aimed at measuring and improving mental health in real-time. Panda now has a voice (there are 8 voices to choose from!) and can engage in real conversations. It also features impressive memory capabilities and customizable personalities.

The Earkick app ranks higher than 99.5% of all other 97,000+ Health & Fitness apps in the US 🇺🇸

FEATURED PORTFOLIO COMPANY: GARDIN

Gardin Agritech is a pioneering agricultural technology company specializing in optical phenotyping solutions that are combined with machine learning to generate insights into plant health and productivity. Gardin's technology applies to any crop species including vegetables, flowers and potted plants.

Thinkable Studio and Gardin have been selected for the prestigious German 'Focus Open 2024 Baden-Württemberg International Design Award' for Gardin's revolutionary phenotyping platform. Congratulations to Sumanta Talukdar and the team!

FEATURED PORTFOLIO COMPANY: CIONIC

CIONIC is on a mission to superpower the human body and help more individuals move with increased freedom and independence.

Congratulations to Jeremiah Robison and the team for being one of the Impact honorees of Fast Company's 2024 Innovation by Design Awards in the Impact category!

VISUAL TECH INDUSTRY NEWS

• To accelerate humanoid development globally, NVIDIA announced it is providing the world’s leading robot manufacturers, AI model developers and software makers with a suite of services, models and computing platforms to develop, train and build the next generation of humanoid robotics.
• Meet the AI-powered robot that’s helping build Amazon-backed solar farms. To conduct its work, Maximo uses AI features including computer vision and data to ensure precise panel placement and real-time construction intelligence to inform its decision-making.
• Google is utilizing AI to optimize traffic signal timings and alleviate congestion in collaboration with Boston, aiming to improve traffic flow.
• Runway announced that Gen-3 Alpha, the new AI video model it unveiled back in mid-June 2024 capable of generating incredibly realistic video in seconds from simple text prompts, now accepts still images as prompts as well.
• Meta introduced Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM 2), an AI model that can identify and track objects across video frames in real-time, marking a significant leap in video AI.
• Apple released the first version of Apple Intelligence. Their AI features are designed to improve Siri, generate images and emails and sort notifications.
• Meta began rolling out more features of its AI Studio to Instagram creators, allowing them to delegate some of the work of connecting with their fans and followers to AI characters.
• DeepMind presented AlphaProof, a new reinforcement-learning-based system for formal math reasoning, and AlphaGeometry 2, an improved version of our geometry-solving system. Together, these systems solved 4 out of 6 problems from this year’s International Mathematical Olympiad, achieving the same level as a silver medalist in the competition for the first time.
• OpenAI announced SearchGPT, its AI-powered search engine. The search engine starts with a large textbox that asks the user “What are you looking for?” But rather than returning a plain list of links, SearchGPT tries to organize and make sense of them.
• Meta released its latest model, Llama 3.1, the world’s largest and most capable openly available foundation model, which performs at least as well as OpenAI's best on most benchmarks.

VISUAL TECH JOBS

New York / Remote

• Gryps , an RPA platform for the construction industry. Data Analyst (Construction Management).
• Clarifai , the leading full-stack AI, LLM, and computer vision production platform for modeling unstructured image, video, text, and audio data. MLOps Engineer, Senior Backend Engineer, and 6 other roles.
• Norbert Health , the first contactless, multimodal vital sign scanner. Artificial Intelligence Tech Lead, Senior AI Engineer and 2 other roles.
• Voyant Photonics is the next generation of chip-scale LiDAR. Perception System Engineer, Project Manager, and Senior Hardware Design Engineer.
• Ezra is on a mission to detect cancer early for everyone in the world, one full-body MRI at a time. Medical Director, Account Manager (Contractor), Growth and Nurse Practitioner, Medical.

Bay Area / Remote

• Roadio , the AI-powered safety platform for small vehicles. Software Engineering Lead, Software Machine Learning Engineer, and Software Backend Engineer.
• Camio , the search engine behind cost-effective video surveillance. Core Software Engineer, Backend API Engineer and UI/UX Design Engineer.
• CIONIC . Superpowering the human body with the CIONIC Neural Sleeve and AI platform for human augmentation. Community Engagement & Advocacy Manager.
• GLASS Imaging . Delivering next-generation smartphone image quality with GLASS AI. Senior Optical/Imaging Systems Engineer, CV/ML/Optics/Algorithms Internships, and 4 other roles.

London, UK / Remote

• Synthesia , the #1 AI video generation platform. Senior Machine Learning Engineer and 18 other roles.
• VitVio . Leveraging AI and computer vision to make operating rooms more efficient with less administrative burden. Senior Software Engineer (Full-Stack) and Senior Product Designer [part-time, 2+ month contract]