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VCs discuss the opportunities — and challenges — in Pittsburgh’s startup ecosystem
Ahead of our TechCrunch City Spotlight: Pittsburgh event tomorrow, I spoke to current Mayor Bill Peduto and Dave Mawhinney, the executive director of Carnegie Mellon University’s Swartz Center for Entrepreneurship. Like many in the Steel City startup community, both share a focus on the historically difficult task of keeping startups in town.
For more on investing in Pittsburgh, be sure to tune in to our City Spotlight on Tuesday, June 29, where we will be joined by Peduto, Duolingo director of engineering Karin Tsai and Carnegie Mellon University President Farnam Jahanian. Register for the free event here.
I asked Peduto and Mawhinney what the single biggest obstacle has been in building out Pittsburgh’s startup ecosystem. Both responded the same way: venture capital. Raising funding is, of course, a hurdle regardless of location, but many VCs have been reluctant to invest in startups outside of traditional hubs like San Francisco and New York.
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“But one of the challenges is getting that capital to come into the community,” said Mawhinney, who leads CMU’s startup efforts. “If you look at how much Uber ATG brought in, how much Argo AI and Aurora — collectively, those three companies, which have all licensed CMU technologies, they’ve all got over $7 billion in collective capital. Not all of it will be spent here, but a lot of it will be spent here. But that doesn’t necessarily trickle down to the next AI startup raising their first $3 million.”
Image Credits: Eilis Garvey/Unsplash
Peduto said growing the VC pipeline has been a focus during his time as mayor.
“I think we’ve been able to convince investors from the coast that the companies don’t need to leave Pittsburgh in order to be highly successful and see their investment pay off,” he told TechCrunch. “However, I believe if we had more venture capital arriving here to help take early-stage companies into that critical next stage of expansion, it would build off itself and it would excel growth in all of the industry cluster, significantly.”
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Activity-monitoring startup Zensors repurposes its tech to help coronavirus response
Computer vision techniques used for commercial purposes are turning out to be valuable tools for monitoring people’s behavior during the present pandemic. Zensors, a startup that uses machine learning to track things like restaurant occupancy, lines and so on, is making its platform available for free to airports and other places desperate to take systematic measures against infection.
The company, founded two years ago but covered by TechCrunch in 2016, was among the early adopters of computer vision as a means to extract value from things like security camera feeds. It may seem obvious now that cameras covering a restaurant can and should count open tables and track that data over time, but a few years ago it wasn’t so easy to come up with or accomplish that.
Since then Zensors has built a suite of tools tailored to specific businesses and spaces, like airports, offices and retail environments. They can count open and occupied seats, spot trash, estimate lines and all that kind of thing. Coincidentally, this is exactly the kind of data that managers of these spaces are now very interested in watching closely given the present social distancing measures.
Zensors co-founder Anuraag Jain told Carnegie Mellon University — which the company was spun out of — that it had received a number of inquiries from the likes of airports regarding applying the technology to public health considerations.
Software that counts how many people are in line can be easily adapted to, for example, estimate how close people are standing and send an alert if too many people are congregating or passing through a small space.
“Rather than profiting off them, we thought we would give our help for free,” said Jain. And so, for the next two months at least, Zensors is providing its platform for free to “selected entities who are on the forefront of responding to this crisis, including our airport clients.”
The system has already been augmented to answer COVID-19-specific questions, like whether there are too many people in a given area, when a surface was last cleaned and whether cleaning should be expedited, and how many of a given group are wearing face masks.
Airports surely track some of this information already, but perhaps in a much less structured way. Using a system like this could be helpful for maintaining cleanliness and reducing risk, and no doubt Zensors hopes that having had a taste via what amounts to a free trial, some of these users will become paying clients. Interested parties should get in touch with Zensors via its usual contact page.
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Wearables might be set to get a whole lot more useful in future if research being conducted by Carnegie Mellon University’s Future Interfaces Group is indicative of the direction of travel.