uc-berkeley
Auto Added by WPeMatico
Highlights from Berkeley SkyDeck’s virtual demo day
With 17 startups participating, Berkeley SkyDeck’s Demo Day isn’t the largest cohort we’ve seen by any stretch. The collection of companies is, however, defined by a wide range of focuses, from pioneering diabetes treatments to retrofitting autonomous trucking, curated by the SkyDeck’s small team and a number of advisors.
Founded in 2012, the accelerator is focused on developing early-stage companies tied to the University of California system. Applicants must be affiliated with either one of the 10 UC schools or their national laboratories in Berkeley, Livermore and Los Alamos. Notable alumni include micromobility unicorn, Lime, and delivery robotics firm, Kiwi.
In 2020, SkyDeck — along with much of the rest of the world — went virtual.
“While flight restrictions did cause some international founders to pull crazy hours from our home countries to participate in the sessions, virtual sessions allowed additional members of our teams to participate that would otherwise not have been able to do so,” the accelerator’s organizers said in a TechCrunch post last year. “We are also hearing chatter that Demo Day will be larger than ever before because virtual events are much more scalable.”
The 17 startups presenting today were whittled down from 1,850 applicants, according to the accelerator. Being a member of the cohort involves six months of launch assistance from SkyDeck, coupled with up $105,000. “In six months, you’re going to pitch on stage at demo day, to an institutional investor in your industry,” Executive Director Caroline Winnett tells TechCrunch.
Here’s a closer look at six highlights from this Demo Day.
EndoCrine
Image Credits: EndoCrine Bio, Inc.
Building on technologies developed in the stem cell research labs of UCSF, EndoCrine is looking to commercialize a better way to discover and develop drugs. Specifically, the startup is hoping to improve diabetes treatment beyond standard insulin injections.
“EndoCrine’s proprietary human stem cell-derived islet platform revolutionizes the drug discovery and development process, saving years of time and millions of dollars usually spent by pharma companies,” CEO Gopika Nair said in a statement offered to TechCrunch. “Our innovative solution opens an exciting era of personalized medicine in diabetes.”
The company says SkyDeck helped it take the earliest steps out of the lab and into startup mode.
NuPort Robotics
Image Credits: NuPort Robotics Inc.
NuPort Robotics is among the most mature of the 17 startups included here. In fact, in mid-March, the startup signed a partnership with Canadian Tire and the Ontario government, as part of a $3 million investment in an autonomous middle-mile trucking solution.
Rather than building autonomous trucking from scratch, NuPort’s solution is designed to retrofit semis with autonomous technologies.
“This results in operational cost reduction by eliminating the need to replace their existing fleet and yields a safer, more efficient and sustainable transportation system,” CEO Raghavender Sahdev tells TechCrunch.
The Hurd Co.
Image Credits: The Hurd Co.
The Hurd Co.’s goal is simple: reduce the environmental impact of clothing companies by helping to remove trees from the process. Specifically, the company creates cellulosic fiber pulp from agricultural byproducts. This is designed to bypass tree-based agrilose, which is used in the production of a wide variety of fabrics, including rayon.
“Apparel brands are scrambling for new, low-impact fabric that will allow them to meet their ambitious sustainability goals,” CEO Taylor Heisley-Cook tells TechCrunch. “We completely eliminate trees from the supply chain with a hyper-efficient process that dramatically reduces brands’ impact on the environment.”
The company says its process uses half the water and significantly less energy than standard processes. The technology was developed by Hurd’s CTO, Charles Cai.
Humm
Image Credits: Humm
I won’t lie, this is the one in the batch I have the most questions about, having seen a number of companies claim their wearables can increase memory.
Here’s what CEO Iain McIntyre has to say: “It’s ideal for activities that depend on memory, like reading, problem solving or multi-tasking. The Humm patch uses tACS (transcranial alternating stimulation) and in clinical research studies, the Humm patch saw a measurable (+~20%) improvement against placebo.”
It’s an interesting underlying technology, and the advisors — which include a number of university professors in the sciences — certainly see commercial potential. There are some lingering questions around tACS.
Quoting Scientific American from January: “The potential therapeutic effects of tACS on memory, food craving and other neural processes have been tested in dozens of studies in the past. Questions have been raised about whether this method actually exerts any meaningful changes in the brain, however.”
Definitely interested in seeing more about this one and perhaps taking it for a spin when the product ships, later this year.
As far as elevator pitches go, Publica may have the best one of the show. “Publica is Shopify for Digital Content.” Essentially, the company wants to be a direct conduit between content creators and consumers.
“Publica is a service that enables authors and content creators to have their own custom storefront to share, market and sell e-books, audiobooks and any other types of digital content with no intermediaries,” CEO Pablo Laurino tells TechCrunch. “In the era of D2C and marketplaces, Publica helps authors and content to achieve that on their own storefront, offering authors complete control over their brand and ownership of the relationships.”
The system helps creators make their own own digital storefront to sell a wide variety of products, including audiobooks and e-books. The site is already up and running, with more than 1,200 stores created by 250 clients.
Serinus Labs
Image Credits: Serinus Labs
Serinus is developing a warning system for detecting failure in lithium-ion batteries.
Per CEO, Hossain Fahad, “Battery safety is the biggest challenge in the EV industry today. Serinus Labs’ proprietary LiCANS technology provides early warning signals to prevent catastrophic battery failure in electric vehicles.”
The tech uses gas sensing to detect early traces of vented gases that occur prior to battery failure.
Powered by WPeMatico
Flourish, a startup that aims to help banks engage and retain customers, raises $1.5M
It’s not uncommon these days to hear of U.S.-based investors backing Latin American startups.
But it’s not every day that we hear of Latin American VCs investing in U.S.-based startups.
Berkeley-based fintech Flourish has raised $1.5 million in a funding round led by Brazilian venture capital firm Canary. Founded by Pedro Moura and Jessica Eting, the startup offers an “engagement and financial wellness” solution for banks, fintechs and credit unions with the goal of helping them engage and retain clients.
Also participating in the round were Xochi Ventures, First Check Ventures, Magma Capital and GV Angels as well as strategic angels including Rodrigo Xavier (former Bank of America CEO in Brazil), Beth Stelluto (formerly of Schwab), Gustavo Lasala (president and CEO of The People Fund) and Brian Requarth (founder of Viva Real).
With clients in the U.S., Bolivia and Brazil, Flourish has developed a solution that features three main modules:
- A rewards engine designed to incentivize users to save or invest money.
- An intelligent and automated micro-savings feature where users can create personalized rules (such as transferring $15 into a rainy day fund every time their favorite sports team wins).
- A financial knowledge module, where personal financial transactions and spending patterns are turned into a question and answer game.
In the U.S., Flourish began by testing end-user mechanics with organizations such as CommonWealth and Opportunity Fund. In 2019, it released a B2C version of the Flourish app (called the Flourish Savings App) as a pilot for its banking platform, which can integrate with banks through an SDK or an API. It is also now licensing its engagement technology to banks, retailers and fintechs across the Americas. Flourish has piloted or licensed its solution to U.S.-based credit unions, Sicoob (Brazil’s largest credit union) and BancoSol in Bolivia.
The startup makes money through a partnership model that focuses on user activation and engagement.
Both immigrants, Moura and Eting met while in the MBA program at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley. Moura came to the U.S. from Brazil as a teen, while Eting is the daughter of a Filiponio father and mother of Mexican descent.
The pair bonded on their joint mission of building a business that empowered people to create positive money habits and understand their finances.
Currently, the 11-person team works out of the U.S., Mexico and Brazil. It plans to use its new capital to increase its number of customers in LatAm, do more hiring and develop new functionalities for the Flourish platform.
In particular, it plans to next focus on the Brazilian market, and will scale in a few select countries in the Americas.
“There are three things that make Latin America, and more specifically Brazil, attractive to us at this moment,” Moura said. “Currently, the B2B financial technology market is still in its nascency. This combined with open banking regulation and the need for more responsible products provides Flourish a unique opportunity in Brazil.”
Powered by WPeMatico
From dorm rooms to board rooms: How universities are promoting entrepreneurship
Earlier this year, 15 top U.S. universities joined forces to launch a one-stop shop where corporations and startups can discover and license patents.
Working in concert, Brown, Caltech, Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, the University of Illinois, Michigan, Northwestern, Penn, Princeton, SUNY Binghamton, UC Berkeley, UCLA, the University of Southern California and Yale formed The University Technology Licensing Program LLC (UTLP) to create a centralized pool of licensable IP.
The UTLP arrives as more higher education institutions are beefing up their investment in the entrepreneurial pipeline to help more students launch startups after graduation. In some instances, schools serve as accelerators, providing students with resources and helping them connect with VCs to find seed funding.
To get a better look at the new program and more insight into the university-to-startup pipeline, we spoke to:
- Jennifer Dyer, executive director, USC Stevens Center for Innovation
- Orin Herskowitz, senior vice president of Intellectual Property and Tech Transfer, Columbia University
- Marc De Leeuw, partner, Sullivan & Cromwell LLP
The UTLP initiative seems to be more focused on licensing IP to existing companies, rather than accelerating university startups.
Orin Herskowitz: The UTLP effort is really much more about licensing to the somewhat broken interface between universities and very large companies in the tech space when it comes to licensing intellectual property. But I know USC and Columbia and many of our peers, especially over the last three to seven years, have pivoted in a massive way to helping our faculty students fulfill their entrepreneurial dreams and launch startups around this exciting university technology.
The word “broken” jumped out at me. Historically, what has the problem been?
Orin Herskowitz: Universities have traditionally been a source of amazing, life-saving and life-improving inventions, for decades. There’s been a ton of new drugs and medical devices, cybersecurity improvements, and search engines, like Google, that have come out of universities over the years, that were federally funded and developed in the labs, and then licensed to either a startup or the industry. And that’s been great. At least over the last couple of decades, that interface has worked really, really well in some fields, but less well in others. So, in the life sciences, in energy, in advanced materials, in those industries, a lot of the time, these innovations that end up having a huge impact on society are based really on one or two or three core eureka moments. There’s like one or two patents that underlie an enormous new cancer drug, for instance.
In the tech space though, it’s a very different dynamic because, a lot of the time, these inventions are incredibly important and they do launch a whole new generation of products and services, but the problem is that a new device, like an iPhone, or a piece of software, might rely on dozens or even hundreds of innovations from across many different universities, as opposed to just one or two.
Obviously not every breakthrough necessitates the launch of a startup. I assume that the vast majority of these things that are coming would make the most sense to work with existing companies.
Jennifer Dyer: We’ve all had this renewed focus on innovation within the university and really helping our students and faculty that want to start companies, launch those companies. If you look at the space, helping educate our students that launching a company in a high-tech space may mean that they have to go out and acquire 100 different licenses, so maybe it doesn’t make sense. We’re going to be doing nonexclusive licensing, and it doesn’t preclude anyone from moving forward with this technology. This is probably the first pool for nonstandard essential patents in the high-tech space, which makes it somewhat unique. Because if you look back, most of the pools have been around standard essential patents.
The question of exclusivity is an interesting one. You wouldn’t grant exclusive rights for the right fee?
Powered by WPeMatico
Helm.ai raises $13M on its unsupervised learning approach to driverless car AI
Four years ago, mathematician Vlad Voroninski saw an opportunity to remove some of the bottlenecks in the development of autonomous vehicle technology thanks to breakthroughs in deep learning.
Now, Helm.ai, the startup he co-founded in 2016 with Tudor Achim, is coming out of stealth with an announcement that it has raised $13 million in a seed round that includes investment from A.Capital Ventures, Amplo, Binnacle Partners, Sound Ventures, Fontinalis Partners and SV Angel. More than a dozen angel investors also participated, including Berggruen Holdings founder Nicolas Berggruen, Quora co-founders Charlie Cheever and Adam D’Angelo, professional NBA player Kevin Durant, Gen. David Petraeus, Matician co-founder and CEO Navneet Dalal, Quiet Capital managing partner Lee Linden and Robinhood co-founder Vladimir Tenev, among others.
Helm.ai will put the $13 million in seed funding toward advanced engineering and R&D and hiring more employees, as well as locking in and fulfilling deals with customers.
Helm.ai is focused solely on the software. It isn’t building the compute platform or sensors that are also required in a self-driving vehicle. Instead, it is agnostic to those variables. In the most basic terms, Helm.ai is creating software that tries to understand sensor data as well as a human would, in order to be able to drive, Voroninski said.
That aim doesn’t sound different from other companies. It’s Helm.ai’s approach to software that is noteworthy. Autonomous vehicle developers often rely on a combination of simulation and on-road testing, along with reams of data sets that have been annotated by humans, to train and improve the so-called “brain” of the self-driving vehicle.
Helm.ai says it has developed software that can skip those steps, which expedites the timeline and reduces costs. The startup uses an unsupervised learning approach to develop software that can train neural networks without the need for large-scale fleet data, simulation or annotation.
“There’s this very long tail end and an endless sea of corner cases to go through when developing AI software for autonomous vehicles, Voroninski explained. “What really matters is the unit of efficiency of how much does it cost to solve any given corner case, and how quickly can you do it? And so that’s the part that we really innovated on.”
Voroninski first became interested in autonomous driving at UCLA, where he learned about the technology from his undergrad adviser who had participated in the DARPA Grand Challenge, a driverless car competition in the U.S. funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. And while Voroninski turned his attention to applied mathematics for the next decade — earning a PhD in math at UC Berkeley and then joining the faculty in the MIT mathematics department — he knew he’d eventually come back to autonomous vehicles.
By 2016, Voroninski said breakthroughs in deep learning created opportunities to jump in. Voroninski left MIT and Sift Security, a cybersecurity startup later acquired by Netskope, to start Helm.ai with Achim in November 2016.
“We identified some key challenges that we felt like weren’t being addressed with the traditional approaches,” Voroninski said. “We built some prototypes early on that made us believe that we can actually take this all the way.”
Helm.ai is still a small team of about 15 people. Its business aim is to license its software for two use cases — Level 2 (and a newer term called Level 2+) advanced driver assistance systems found in passenger vehicles and Level 4 autonomous vehicle fleets.
Helm.ai does have customers, some of which have gone beyond the pilot phase, Voroninski said, adding that he couldn’t name them.
Powered by WPeMatico
This bathroom cleaning robot is trained in VR to clean up after you
You’ve no doubt heard about the three Ds of automation. Somatic’s robot handily qualifies for two. I’d say “dangerous” is probably a bit of a stretch here, but the robot is well-focused on replacing a job that’s generally regarded as both “dirty” and “dull.”
The startup, which is ostensibly based in the New York area (it’s a small, geographically dispersed team in search of a more permanent home) effectively came out of stealth onstage at TC Sessions: Robotics + AI at UC Berkeley. Its first product is a large, commercial restroom cleaning robot.
CEO Michael Levy compares the device to a “minifridge with a robot arm attached to the front.” Levy, who co-founded the company with CTO Eugene Zasoba, says he was inspired to develop a robot for bathroom cleaning after years spent working his way up at his grandfather’s restaurant.
“When I grew up, I did a bunch of jobs. He said, if you want to get to the register, you have start in the bathroom,” he explains. “The reason bathrooms are such a good application, because everything is bolted down to the floor. Things move in a predictable way. All commercial bathrooms built after 1994 are ADA compliant. What’s good for robotics is that lays a specific design.”
The static nature of most commercial restrooms means that robots only have to train on a space once. The team does the work remotely now, using a VR simulation of the bathroom to show the robot where to spray and wipe chemicals, vacuum and blow-dry. It’s an activity the team affectionately refers to as “the worst video game, ever.” Once all of that is in place, the robot uses a variety of sensors, including lidar, to navigate around.
The robot will clean a restroom, then go to recharge and refill chemicals as needed. It should get around eight hours of cleaning done in a day and can even open doors and ride the elevator to get around buildings, according to Levy.
Prime targets include airports, casinos, office spaces and other spots with large commercial restrooms. The robot will be leased out for around $1,000 a month, after a trial phase. Somatic already has a handful of customers, including a FAANG company, whose offices are already being cleaned by the robot.
The first model was created with help from $50,000 in bootstrapped funds, to which Somatic has added $300,000, including $150,000 from SOSV.
Powered by WPeMatico
Going fast: Buy a demo table at TC Sessions: Robotics+AI 2020
Startup founders, set your sites on TC Sessions: Robotics+AI, which takes place on March 3, 2020. This annual day-long event draws the brightest minds and makers from these two industries — 1,500 attendees last year alone. And if you really want to make 2020 a game-changing year, grab yourself a demo table and showcase your early-stage robotics or AI startup in front of those big names and serious influencers.
Simply purchase an Early-Stage Startup Exhibitor Package — the price includes four tickets to the event, so bring your crew, flex your networking mojo and take in some of the many discussions throughout the day. Get yours before they’re gone — only eight left.
The day’s programming covers a wide range of crucial issues focused on robotics and AI. TC editors conduct in-depth interviews and moderate panel discussions and Q&As with the industries’ leading minds, makers, technologists, researchers and investors. You’ll enjoy workshops, demos and plenty of networking opportunities.
We’re talking topics that appeal to every hungry startup founder. Like a panel discussion on investing featuring Eric Migicovsky, Kelly Chen and Dror Berman — all top VCs in robotics and AI.
These folks have their fingers on the pulse of robotics, AI and automation. They’ll be on hand to share insights on future industry trends, talk about the most compelling startups and what they look for when it comes to funding.
We’ll be sharing details and the names of plenty more speakers in the coming weeks, so keep checking back. You can always check out last year’s program to get a sense of what to expect.
Did you know we have a new twist to this year’s Session? It’s a pitch competition — Pitch Night. It takes place the night before, it doesn’t cost a thing and it’s open to founders of early-stage startups focused on robotics and AI. There’s only one small hoop to jump through: apply here by February 1.
TC Sessions: Robotics+AI takes place on March 3, 2020 at UC Berkeley. Buy your Early-Stage Startup Exhibitor Package today, and come impress the top technologists, makers, thinkers, researchers and investors. Make 2020 your game-changing year.
Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at TC Sessions: Robotics+AI 2020? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.
Powered by WPeMatico
Anyscale, from the creators of the Ray distributed computing project, launches with $20.6M led by a16z
Open source has become a critical building block of modern software, and today a new startup is coming out of stealth to capitalise on one of the newer frontiers in open source: using it to build and manage distributed application environments, an approach being used increasingly to handle large computing projects, such as those involving artificial intelligence or scientific or other complex calculations.
Anyscale, a startup founded by the same team that built the Project Ray open-source distributed programming framework out of UC Berkeley — Robert Nishihara, Philipp Moritz and Ion Stoica, and Berkeley professor Michael I. Jordan — has raised $20.6 million in a Series A round of funding led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation also from NEA, Intel Capital, Ant Financial, Amplify Partners, 11.2 Capital and The House Fund.
The company plans to use the money to build out its first commercial products — details of which are still being kept under wraps but will more generally include the ability to easily scale out a computing project from one laptop to a cluster of machines; and a group of libraries and applications to manage projects. These are expected to launch next year.
“Right now we are focused on making Ray a standard for building applications,” said Stoica in an interview. “The company will build tools and a runtime platform for Ray. So, if you want to run a Ray application securely and with high performance then you will use our product.”
The funding is partly strategic: Intel is one of the big companies that has been using Ray for its own computing projects, alongside Amazon, Microsoft and Ant Financial.
“Intel IT has been leveraging Ray to scale Python workloads with minimal code modifications,” said Moty Fania, principal engineer and chief technology officer for Intel IT’s Enterprise and Platform Group, in a statement. “With the implementation into Intel’s manufacturing and testing processes, we have found that Ray helps increase the speed and scale of our hyperparameter selection techniques and auto modeling processes used for creating personalized chip tests. For us, this has resulted in reduced costs, additional capacity and improved quality.”
With an impressive user list like this for the free-to-use Ray, you might ask yourself, what is the purpose of Anyscale? As Stoica and Nishihara explained, the idea will be to create simpler and easier ways to implement Ray, to make it usable whether you’re one of the Amazons of the world, or a more modest, and possibly less tech-centric operation.
“We see that this will be valuable mostly for companies who do not have engineering experts,” Stoica said.
The problem that Anyscale is solving is a central one to the future of large-scale, involved computing projects: there are an increasing array of problems that are being tackled with computing solutions, but as the complexity of the work involved increases, there is a limit to how much work a single machine (even a big one) can handle. (Indeed, Anyscale cites IDC figures estimating that the amount of data created and copied annually will reach 175 zettabytes by 2025.)
While one day there may be quantum-computing machines that can run efficiently and at scale to address these kinds of tasks, today this isn’t a realistic option, and so distributed computing has emerged as a solution.
Ray was devised as a standard to use to implement distributed computing environments, but on its own it’s too technical for the uninitiated to use.
“Imagine you’re a biologist,” added Nishihara. “You can write a simple program and run it at a large scale, but to do that successfully you need not only to be a biology expert but a computing expert. That’s just way too high a barrier.”
The people behind Anyscale (and Ray) have a long and very credible list of other work behind them that speaks to the opportunities that are being spotted here. Stoica, for example, was also the co-founder of Databricks, Conviva and one of the original developers of Apache Spark.
“I worked on Databricks with Ion and that’s how it started,” Andreessen Horowitz co-founder Ben Horowitz said in an interview. He added that the firm has been a regular investor into projects coming out of UC Berkeley. Ray, and more specifically Anyscale, is notable for its relevance to today’s computing needs.
“With Ray it was a very attractive project because of the open-source metrics but also because of the issue it addresses,” he said.
“We’ve been grappling with Moore’s Law being over, but more interestingly, it’s inadequate for things like artificial intelligence applications,” where increasing computing power is needed that outstrips what any single machine can do. “You have to be able to deal with distributed computing, but the problem for everyone but Google is that distributed computing is hard, so we have been looking for a solution.”
Powered by WPeMatico
Apply to the pitch-off at TC Sessions: Robotics+AI 2020
Mark your calendars and dust off your public-speaking skills. This year, there’s an exciting new opportunity at TC Sessions: Robotics + AI, which returns to UC Berkeley on March 3, 2020. We’ve added a pitch-off specifically for early-stage startups focused on AI or robotics.
You heard right. In addition to a full day packed with speakers, breakout sessions and Q&As featuring the top names, leading minds and creative makers in robotics and AI, we’re upping the ante. We’ll choose 10 startups to pitch at a private event the night before the show opens. Here’s how it works.
The first step: Apply to the pitch-off by February 1. TechCrunch editors will review all applications and select 10 startups to participate. We’ll notify the founders by February 15 — you’ll have plenty of time to hone your pitch.
You’ll deliver your pitch at a private event, and your audience will consist of TechCrunch editors, main-stage speakers and industry experts. Our panel of VC judges will choose five teams as finalists, and they will pitch the next day on the main stage at TC Sessions: Robotics + AI.
Talk about an unprecedented opportunity. Place your startup in front of the influential movers and shakers of these two world-changing industries — and get video coverage on TechCrunch, too. We expect attendance to meet or exceed last year’s, when 1,500 people attended the show and tens of thousands followed along online.
Oh, and here’s one more pitch-off perk. Each of the 10 startup team finalists will receive two free tickets to attend TC Sessions: Robotics + AI 2020 the next day.
TC Sessions: Robotics + AI 2020 takes place on March 3. Apply to the pitch-off here by February 1. Don’t want to pitch? That’s fine — but don’t miss this epic day-long event dedicated to exploring the latest technology, trends and investment strategies in robotics and AI. Get your early-bird ticket here and save $100. We’ll see you in Berkeley!
Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at TC Sessions: Robotics & AI 2020? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.
Powered by WPeMatico
Score Cyber Monday savings on TechCrunch Sessions 2020 passes
Have we got a Cyber Monday deal for you. TC Sessions: Robotics+AI (March 3) and TC Sessions: Mobility (May 14) are coming back to California in 2020, with early-bird tickets starting at $275 and $250 respectively. But if you buy your pass today, you’ll save an extra 15% on each event. How sweet is that?
Don’t delay, startuppers. Buy your pass to TC Sessions: Robotics+AI and/or TC Sessions: Mobility before this one-day deal expires promptly tonight at 11:59 pm PT.
Oh, and did we mention that all startup exhibitor tables are also 15% off? Tables are good for early-stage startups and come with four (4) tickets and demo area at the conference. Book your table for Mobility here or one for Robotics here.
It doesn’t take artificial intelligence to recognize great opportunity, and you’ll find plenty of it at our day-long exploration of the latest issues, trends, tech and products in robotics+AI and mobility. At each of last year’s events, 1,000+ of each category’s top minds and makers gathered for live interviews, demos and workshops featuring world-renown technologists, founders and investors — not to mention world-class networking.
Past Robotics+AI Speakers:
- Marc Raibert, Boston Dynamics
- Melonee Wise, Fetch Robotics
- Colin Angle, iRobot
Past Mobility Speakers:
- Ted Serbinski, Techstars
- Nils Wollny, Holoride
- Ken Washington, Ford
We’re just getting started on building out the event agenda and we’ll announce plenty more speakers and panelists over the coming months, so keep checking back.
Mark your calendar, join us at UC Berkeley on March 3 for TC Sessions: Robotics or come to San Jose on May 14 for TC Sessions: Mobility and spend an entire day with the best and brightest minds and makers. Don’t miss this Cyber Monday opportunity to save an extra 15% on tickets to TC Sessions: Robotics+AI and/or TC Sessions: Mobility.
Powered by WPeMatico
Registration is open for TC Sessions: Robotics + AI 2020
It’s time to get your robotics fix, startup fans. That’s right, TC Sessions: Robotics & AI returns to UC Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall on March 3, 2020. Join us for a day-long deep dive focused on the intersection of robotics and AI — arguably two of the most exciting and world-changing technologies.
Registration is now open. Save the date and save $100 when you buy an early-bird ticket to TC Sessions: Robotics & AI 2020. Want to save even more? Buy in bulk. You’ll save an extra 18% when you purchase four or more tickets at once.
This is our fourth year hosting this event and last year, 1,500 founders, technologists, engineering students and investors heard TechCrunch editors interview top leaders in AI and robotics, participated in workshops, watched live demos, attended speaker Q&As and enjoyed world-class networking. With so many advances in a range of technologies like AI, GPUs, sensors (to name just a few), it’s an exciting time to be part of this rapidly evolving space.
We’re building out the speaker roster and agenda, so keep checking back. In the meantime, take a look at last year’s agenda to get a sense of the quality programming you can expect.
Boston Dynamics founder Marc Raibert, a perennial favorite at TC Sessions: Robotics & AI, offers this perspective on the conference. It “blends the best of thoughtful, research-focused robotics with a unique business in technology focus.”
TC Sessions: Robotics & AI takes place on March 3, 2020 at UC Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall. It’s not too early to save the date, and it’s never too early to save $100 on the price of admission. Join the top people in robotics and AI for a full day devoted to world-changing technologies.
Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at TC Sessions: Robotics & AI 2020? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.
Powered by WPeMatico