Magic AI, the startup using artificial intelligence to better understand and care for horses, is adding more talent to its stable with the acquisition of Victory Parade, another equine machine learning company.
Seattle-based Magic AI was co-founded in 2017 by Alexa Anthony, and they raised a $1.2 million seed round in April. The company’s signature product is StableGuard, a 24-hour monitoring and alert system for horses, and the plan is for the platform to be augmented by state-of-the-art equine-specific software developed by Victory Parade.
Kyle Lampe, founder and CEO of the Bellevue, Wash.-based Victory Parade, will join Magic AI as vice president of development. Lampe spent several years as a software developer at Microsoft before leaving to head up development teams at Zumobi and SnapIn. He returned to to Microsoft as the lead developer on Kinect Sesame Street TV and was also lead developer for the Xbox video editing and sharing platform Upload Studio.
“I am incredibly excited to continue developing cutting-edge software for the equine industry with the StableGuard team,” Lampe said in a news release. “Alexa and the team at StableGuard share my goal of using computer vision and machine learning to improve the lives of equine athletes.”
StableGuard was developed to help improve the performance of competitive horse by keeping them healthy and injury free. Via video monitoring in a horse’s stall, the product works by learning to recognize various signals put off by the animal related to everything from stress, comfort related to temperature, food and water consumption, waste evacuation, pregnancy and security.
“We are looking forward to incorporating the developments from Victory Parade into our platform,” Anthony said. “There will be some interesting new features our app can provide in the future, but I don’t want to share too much too soon.”
