Artificial Intelligence is a reality, and a machine is already able to predict the potential of a startup through the analysis of data and questions. This is what happened yesterday in Valencia, where Preseries has chosen Novelti as the project with the most chances of success. An event that was born as a result of an alliance between Telefónica Open Future and BigML, promoting Machine Learning to become part of our lives.
In the middle of the week of the Fallas of Valencia, gunpowder and noise are part of the atmosphere of the streets of the city, but sparks also jumped in the Auditorium of the Polytechnic University (UPV), where the first “Startup Battle” of PAPIs Connect took place. A congress of predictive analysis, focused on the field of Artificial Intelligence, born from the union between Telefónica Open Future and BigML to create Preseries, an application capable of to predict the success of a startup based on a series of data.
After a morning full of talks and conferences held by referents in the world of Artificial Intelligence, such as Laura Oliver, Scientific Director of Telefónica I + D, or Ramon Lopez de Mantaras, Director of the Artificial Intelligence Institute of the Higher Center for Scientific Research (CSIC), the most awaited moment of the Predictive Analysis Congress arrived: the Battle of startups between five finalist companies: Datatrics, Emotion Research Lab,Intranetum, Novelti and Restb. The main novelty of this contest: that the decision, for the first time, is made based on the criteria of an algorithm.
The prelude to the battle was led by Mª Jesús Alonso and Poul Peterson of BigML, who presented the joint venture created by BigML and Telefónica Open Future, which also had the presence of its main managers: Francisco J. Martín and Ana Segurado. “In recent years we have seen that around 80% of the startups we know fail in the first five years of development. With the implementation of this innovative technology we can mitigate the risk involved in the investment of new businesses and help startups to implement better business models to ensure their future,” explained Ana Segurado.
Before the expectation of the public, the nerves began to be felt among the protagonists of the battle, as the moment approached to go on stage to present and demonstrate the advantages of their project, in three and a half minutes, before Preseries and the assistants.
Five startups with five ambitious projects:
- Datatrics. It provides a very affordable and easy-to-use predictive marketing platform for marketing teams.
- Emotion Research Lab. It is a technology of behavioral analysis through facial recognition.
- Intranetum. This company uses Artificial Intelligence to classify the knowledge of an organization
- Novel. It offers real-time analytics for anomaly detection and prevention from the cloud on IoT-connected devices.
- Restb. With its Deep Learning technology, it allows to monitor the contents generated by users who upload photos to online spaces.
After the presentation of their different projects, the Preseries system he began to evaluate each project through a battery of questions such as, for example, the funding rounds they have made, whether the founder has led other projects before, or how many people make up the startup… In that context, and together with the various parameters that he already knew, Preseries established a score of 0 to 100 to crown the winner, who turned out to be Novelti with a clear difference with respect to the second classified, Intranetum.
A round finish for Novelti, who took the victory with a score of 86/100. Marco Laucelli, Co-Founder of the company, together with Álvaro Agea, Chief Technology Officer of Novelti, received the award from Ana Segurado: a direct investment of 40,000 euros and the possibility of having the support of the Wayra accelerator.
“It is very important that Telefónica invites us to be part of its Wayra initiative and its entire ecosystem. On the other hand, having the opportunity to exhibit in Boston is a great prize for us,” says Marco Laucelli, Co-Founder of Novelti.
And as a final draw for this party in which failures and Artificial Intelligence joined, Novelti will participate in the global battle of startups in Boston, which will be held at the end of 2016.
A great culmination for this project that thanks to Machine Learning has been chosen without any human manipulation.
