Meet the inaugural batch of startups in Europe's first AI accelerator

Den Bosch, the Netherlands

Summary

The startups selected for the AI accelerator will receive €20,000 cash and €80,000 of in-kind funding, office space in Den Bosch for the duration of the program, support from mentors from relevant industries, as well as more than 50 perks and deals worth some €600,000.

Rockstart has announced the startups selected for its AI accelerator program located in Den Bosch, the Netherlands. The teams from all over the world will spend the next 180 days shaping and building their products, talking to mentors, and connecting to potential investors and customers.

The startups selected for the AI accelerator will receive €20,000 cash and €80,000 of in-kind funding, office space in Den Bosch for the duration of the program, support from mentors from relevant industries, as well as more than 50 perks and deals worth some €600,000.

In addition to this, one of the lead investors of Rockstart's acceleration programs has committed to invest at least €200,000 in an AI Startup of their choosing after the Demo Day that's scheduled for March 7, 2018.

The list of partners of the AI accelerator includes VodafoneZiggo, Exact, de Volksbank, NVIDIA, Atlassian, Wintertaling, Grant Thornton, and the Jheronimus Academy of Data Science (JADS). Together with a stellar lineup of mentors, they will support and guide the startups chosen for this year’s program through the challenges of technology and business development.

Here are the teams that have made it to Europe's first AI accelerator.

Airsquire (Singapore)

Airsquire empowers sales forces in real estate with cognitive sales and marketing automation tools, such as hawk-eyes and photographic memory, which provides intelligent space inspection. They employ a statistical learning algorithm that ensures a high level of chatbot accuracy.

Aziobot (India)

Built on the experience of building software for self-driving cars in India, Aziobot is devising autonomous robots to clean, collect, and dispose of garbage and dust from streets and floors on their own. These robots are electric and cloud-connected, making the cleaning practices green, consistent and easy to manage.

Baarb (United States)

Baarb is a “Netflix-like” recommender system for travelers to book hotels. It analyzes hundreds of millions of data points, structured and unstructured, some exclusive to Baarb, to deliver personalized results. Baarb offers a solution where booking platforms can insert their inventory through API to implement a powerful and personalized search. The startup also provides a white-label solution for travel sites that don’t currently offer hotel booking.

Birds.ai (The Netherlands)

The Birds.ai team previously founded Dutch UAS to develop and test an affordable and easy-to-use smart drone system for wildlife protection. The system was part of anti-poaching operations in several wildlife reserves in Africa. Later on, the team shifted focus to automated visual inspections for high-value assets such as wind turbines and founded Birds.ai.

Birds.ai uses AI to create artificial inspectors which instantly and automatically finds defects in images collected by drones. The images can be uploaded to their cloud service and Birds.ai goes through the images and sorts them by putting the images that show a damage or a defect on top. The location of the defect can be pinpointed on the image.

Cambridge Humanae (Italy)

Cambridge Humanae combines psychological tests and artificial intelligence to understand human reliability by estimating stress resilience of high-risk individuals, such as soldiers, pilots and policemen. The company is developing a SaaS monitoring platform which combines risk-tailored psychological tests and artificial intelligence algorithms to increase accuracy of monitoring over time. It has recently developed intellectual property and an MVP targeted at stress-coping analysis, focusing on the screening of military personnel.

GeoSpark (India)

The founder of GeoSpark (previously known as Holo) is an Aerospace Engineer who applied his knowledge of using AI location-based, energy-efficient technology to solve the issue of battery drain during location tracking, which results in 90 percent reduction of an app’s energy consumption. GeoSpark uses predictive AI learning from past behavior of a user to completely reimagine location tracking. This startup was accepted in the AI Accelerator after participating in Rockstart’s AI Launchtrack program.

OPTOSS (The Netherlands)

OPTOSS is a tool for telecom and service providers which helps prevent major incidents (outages) on the critical networks, and keeps their customers happy and protected from operational and cyber threats. OPTOSS is an industry first, field-ready expert system based on artificial intelligence. It augments human operator capabilities and allows them to tackle any problem with entrusted critical infrastructures before service disruptions affect critical networks.

Overscore AI (South Africa)

Overscore AI provides an automated screening engine for job applicants. A proprietary algorithm and workflow stack is used to “read” a document as a human would. To achieve this, the system looks at the relationships between words as they exist in the natural language context and then teaches the prediction engine to understand the words as such.

Peazy (India)

Peazy (a.k.a. Park Easy) has built a parking prediction model that applies machine learning on crowd-sourced GPS data to locate free parking lots. The tool uses GPS data and feedback from users to train a learning algorithm to keep the platform up to date.