Today I’m rolling out the Cognite 300 poster, a handy guide to the more focused and interesting startup companies in cognitive computing and deep learning. I wrote about the ideas behind the creation of the list in an earlier blog posting:
Who are the most important start-ups in cognitive computing?
I have updated the on-line list every couple of months since the start of 2017, and will continue to do so, because the list keeps changing. Some companies close, some are acquired, some shift their focus. Most importantly, I continue to discover startups that belong on the list, so I will keep adding those, using approximately the same criteria of focus used for the first batch.
I should underscore that many potentially interesting companies haven’t gone on the list:
- because it appears that AI is only a modest piece of their value proposition, or
- because there is too little information on their websites to judge, or
- because they doing interesting work on capturing and curating big data sets (that may ultimately require deep learning methods) but don’t emphasize learning work themselves, or
- I just failed to understand the significance of the company’s offerings
A few weeks ago, a venture capital colleague suggested that I should do a poster, to make the list more accessible and to communicate a bit of the big picture of segments and focus areas for these companies. I classified the companies (alas, by hand, not with a neural network 😉 into 16 groups
- Sec – Security, Surveillance, Monitoring
- Cars – Autonomous Vehicles
- HMI – Human-Machine Interface
- Robot – Drones and Robots
- Chip – Silicon Platforms
- Plat -Deep Learning Cloud Compute/Data Platform and Services
- VaaSVision as a Service
- ALaaS – Audio and Language as a Service
- Mark – Marketing and Advertising
- CRM – Customer Relationship Management and Human Resources
- Manf – Operations, Logistics and Manufacturing
- Sat – Aerial Imaging and Mapping
- Med – Medicine and Health Care
- Media – Social Media, Entertainment and Lifestyle
- Fin – Finance, Insurance and Commerce
- IT – IT Operations and Security
I’ve also included an overlay of two broader categories, Vision and Embedded. Many of the 16 categories fall cleanly inside or outside embedded and vision, but some categories include all the combinations. A few companies span two of the 16 groups, so they are shown in both.
You may download and use the poster as you wish, so long as you reproduce it in its entirety, do not modify it and maintain the attribution to Cognite Ventures.
Finally, I have also updated the list itself, including details on the classification of the startup by the 16 categories and the 2 broader classes, and identifying the primary country of operations. For US companies I’ve also including the primary state.