Microsoft Ventures today announced its third batch of Seattle Accelerator startups that are focusing on machine learning and data science.
Microsoft’s accelerator in Seattle first launched in 2014 with a cohort of home automation startups. Last year, it welcomed “digital work” companies for its second batch.
Now, the third cohort is all about cognitive technologies. Microsoft cited a Deloitte study that noted $1 billion of venture capital invested in machine learning and data science over the past two years.
Microsoft spent the past several months on a cross-country tour across 12 cities in the U.S. and Canada to select the 10 new startups for its third Seattle accelerator class. Companies from more than 50 countries applied to be in the program.
For the next four months, each company in the accelerator will get a helping hand from Microsoft experts as well as extra perks like access to Azure cloud services and a $25,000 grant. The entrepreneurs will pitch their startups at a Demo Day in June.
Microsoft Ventures helps the Redmond company invest in early-stage startups and run accelerator programs around the world. Microsoft recently tapped former Qualcomm Ventures leader Nagraj Kashyap to run its own startup investment program.
Here are the 10 new startups, with descriptions from Microsoft:
- Affinio, based in New York City, provides actionable audience insights that let brands and agencies understand social silent majority.
- Agolo, based in New York City, builds proprietary summarization technology for analysts that improve accuracy of reporting by 4x.
- Clarify, based in Austin, allows developers to search and understand audio and video using a simple API.
- DefinedCrowd, based in Seattle, is a platform that provides big data for Speech and NLP Technology by combining crowd sourcing and machine learning.
- Knomos, based in Vancouver, BC, is a knowledge network leveraging data visualization for legal research, education, and user collaboration.
- MedWhat, based in Palo Alto, is an artificial intelligence doctor that answers medical questions, has personalized medical conversations with the user about their daily health & wellness, provides medical reminders and follows up using the user’s health record and medical sensor data.
- OneBridge Solutions, based in Boise, provides enterprise, mission-critical cloud apps for pipeline companies using MS Azure, Big Data and Machine learning.
- Percolata, based in Palo Alto, optimizes retail labor through sensors and mobile and web applications.
- Plexuss, based in Walnut Creek, Calif., is radically changing the way universities find and recruit students.
- simMachines, based in St. Louis, provides metric and non-metric nearest neighbor classifiers, recommendations, clustering and search with a new family of dense distance functions (cloud-based SaaS).
