Oct 17, 2024

Rockstart has selected the startups for its 2nd AI accelerator program located in Den Bosch, the Netherlands. Talented women and men from eight different countries will spend the next 180 days building and refining their products, talking to mentors, and connecting to potential investors and customers. The first AI program is already showing how successful it was, with three alumni raising a total of €1.2 million within the first 6 months after the program ended and a vast range of technology collaborations between startups and corporates kicked-off. “The AI program is focused on providing access to market for deep technology companies. We connect founders with the most relevant industry players and facilitate the process in order to drive partnerships and pilot customers for the startups in the AI program. We also support the startups with access to expertise, community, and capital, as with our other programs” said Marjel Quekel, Accelerator Director at Rockstart. The startups also gain access to state-of-the-art research know-how and talent through Rockstart’s partnership with Jheronimus Academy of Data Science (JADS). JADS a is a Master’s and Ph.D. Data Science University focused on entrepreneurship. Our other AI partners include VodafoneZiggo, de Volksbank, NVIDIA, Atlassian, IBM Watson, and Grant Thornton. Apart from our stellar lineup of partners, we have a network of experienced mentors. The mentors will support and guide the startups chosen for this year’s program through the challenges of technology and business development. “In the enterprise world, there are two types of companies; those who already have an AI strategy and those who are seeking to have an AI strategy. This makes for fertile ground. That’s not to say there won’t be challenges ahead, but with the support of the program, our ecosystem and our partners, we aim to help these promising startups establish the fundamentals required for a successful business” said Bernard McKeown, AI Program Director at Rockstart. The nine startups taking part in the AI 2018 program come from multiple backgrounds and originate from across seven countries. Cramstack (Bangladesh) provides a natural language-driven interface that analyses and visualizes data with which it learns from a users behavior. This eliminates the software learning curve seen in other Business Intelligence platforms. Cramstack can be connected with multiple data sources which provides a smart analytics ecosystem that automatically models data to facilitate insights generation. Sentetic (Italy) works with any equipment connected sensors, it extracts data directly from a users database or enterprise asset management system. It uses existing historical data to do a multitude of tasks from identifying unseen anomalies to scheduling tasks based on priority classes. The predictive engine analyzes and builds a forecasting model of operating condition, compares real-time data and notifies OSS if there is an anomaly. Medvice (the Netherlands) uses neural networks to aid doctors in their decisions and speed up the consultation process. Medvice AI gradually learns and processes better and smart solutions to help improve care. With this AI technology Medvice consultation will be safer while reducing waiting times and being cost efficient. Element 13 (France) is a machine learning add-on for data providers such as Elasticsearch, InfluxData’s and TICK stack. It uses CLI to create, train and manage users machine learning jobs, as well as provides an API embed machine learning directly into users own application. Its mission is to facilitate AI technology adoption with the fastest time to market. It does this by removing the complexity involved with Tensorflow, allowing software developers to learn ML quickly and produce reliable results for their business. Pixyle (Macedonia) platform uses AI to train machines to recognize garments in images. The platform then performs similarity matching of the clothes in an image with the clothes of all sustainable brands that it collaborates with. Through this, it gives recommendations on where to buy the item. This makes identifying consumers taste and showing them where to buy products from sustainable brands effortless. Agrex AI (India) transforms visual data into actionable business intelligence. It allows users to count customers and identify them by age and gender. Through this retailers gain valuable intelligence to better understand what merchandise to stock its stores. Agrex Video content analysis (AVCA) allows users to automatically analyze video to detect and determine events in real time. Taktify (Iran)  offers users a smart social media post management solution through AI, removing the need for media experts. By using both text data mining and image recognition it is able to provide companies valuable insights into customer feedback, profiles, and preferences. Taktify is supported by two talented Iranian women breaking the glass ceiling in their region. Xane AI (India) is an AI chatbot for companies to use for employee management. It acts as an assistant for CEO’s and through AI and machine learning is able to interact with employees on the CEO’s belief. Xane AI chatbot is able to interact with employees of organizations any collaboration platform the company uses. Footty (Ukraine) uses image recognition AI technology to create high-quality foot scans and make an accurate shoe fit prediction based only on feet photos and sales data. This ensures people have the correct shoe fit. It can be used by offline and online retailers, without any application or hardware required. About Rockstart Rockstart is an early stage investor that empowers purpose-driven founders across three domains: Energy, AgriFood, and Emerging Technologies. Rockstart invests in early-stage startups from each of the three funds and provides access to capital, market, and expertise by connecting founders with co-investors, mentors, partners, corporates, and the wider Rockstart network. Rockstart has invested in more than 350 startups and its alumni value to date is more than €1.7bn. Rockstart is an international team of 45+ professionals dedicated to empowering purpose-driven founders to become scalable and drive positive change on a global scale. Rockstart has notable exits such asWercker, Dan.com, Hubs.Com, Bouw7, iClinic, and s and Brincr. The company has offices in Amsterdam, Copenhagen, and Bogota. Contact details