1871 Announces 2024 AI Innovation Lab Cohort

2024 Cohort Members 

Agtools Inc | Martha Montoya, CEO 

Agtools’ real-time curation of thousands of supply network, logistical, climate, trade, commercial, and wider industrial variables on multiple continents – procures billions of data records usable by 26 industries across many organizational verticals ranging from agriculture to finance to government regulations. Among our applied solutions are the Advance Sustainability Knowledge System (ASKS), which curates a full value chain prism for each studied commodity, and the Advanced Phase Expert System (APExS), which rigorously reconciles myriad intractable extrinsic facets influencing said commodities to afford thorough resource citations to aid decision making.

Arvist | Nilay Parikh, Founder & CEO 

Arvist improves distribution and warehousing operations by optimizing loading docks for efficiency, quality, and compliance, using data from existing infrastructure like security cameras, cell phone cameras and WMS (Warehouse Management System), and its artificial intelligence platform. Currently in production deployment across the US and Canada, including at logistics operations for the Department of Defense. Data secure on-prem AI solution for practical use cases in warehousing and logistics space. 

Autonoma | Eugenio Scafati, CEO

Technical debt is a huge pain that IT teams from corporations have. Tech debt triggers business issues in the roadmap (worse time-to-market and lack of predictability), team dynamics (attrition and personnel dependencies), and product bugs, which leads to worse customer experience. Within Autonoma, we are solving this by leveraging AI to map the codebase and its interconnections, assess code quality, and identify opportunities for code enhancement. 

CloudnineAI | Michael Brown, Founder 

Cloudnine AI’s innovative solutions aim to save time and resources, presenting a value proposition that extends beyond the typical offerings in the market. Key benefits of Cloudnine AI’s software include advanced data governance capabilities that automate compliance with some of the world’s most complex global requirements. The software also features a 3-tier dynamic encryption system, ensuring high-level security classified as IL6 by the Department of Defense, illustrating the commitment to data protection.

CodeComplete AI | Lydia Ding, Co-Founder

CodeComplete is an AI-powered coding assistant and developer productivity suite built for enterprises. We deploy within your infrastructure so that your IP never leaves your security boundaries. This is the best way to protect against data breaches and IP leaks. We offer models that are trained on permissively licensed code, so you don’t risk adding copyright or copyleft artifacts into your codebase. We fine-tune our model directly on your codebase so it incorporates your libraries, coding patterns, and institutional knowledge. The results are more relevant and effective.

CryptoLegacy.ai | Sree Chintala, CEO

We’re transforming legacy and estate planning through a conversational platform fueled by advanced technologies, catering to consumers and attorneys. Estate planning suffers from obsolescence, inefficiency, high costs, and low adoption rates. Shockingly, in the top 5 world economies alone, over a billion adults lack wills or directives. Misinformation, inadequate education, and misconceptions lead to significant financial losses, denial of crucial medical care, and profound familial distress. Our platform aims to raise awareness, boost adoption rates, and eliminate excuses and financial barriers for consumers. Additionally, we equip attorneys with invaluable insights, qualified leads, and streamlined processes. Our chat engine serves as a pivotal bridge connecting a billion consumers with a quarter million attorneys, facilitating smoother estate planning processes for all involved.

dFarm | Prasanna Kolla, Software Developer Lead 

dFarm is an integrated agricultural supply-chain management software powered by blockchain.

Drip Tech Co. | Karishma Bali, CEO & Founder 

Drip is a b2b saas company building ai for physiological performance. We do this by focusing on core components of human function, such as  strain + perfusion, recovery, and hydration. Our first product is a hydration monitoring wearable and fuel concierge, and our initial target market are d1 universities.

DynamoFL | Vaikkunth Mugunthan, CEO 

DynamoFL products (DynamoEval ad DynamoGuard) are built for enterprise businesses in the financial services, banking, healthcare, insurance, and automotive sectors who are looking to deploy secure, compliant, and safe Generative AI. DynamoEval is our solution for streamlined adversarial testing and red-teaming of LLMs for data leakage and hallucination vulnerabilities. DynamoEval autogenerates compliance documentation that enterprises can leverage to demonstrate adherence to regulatory requirements around AI. DynamoGuard is our solution for offering fully customized AI guardrails to implement your enterprise’s bespoke AI governance policies. DynamoGuard includes a comprehensive observability platform for recording and auditing every user interaction with your AI system and triages incidents for compliance violations. 

Extend | Hari Anbarasu, Co-Founder & CTO

Extend empowers operations leaders to turn their business-critical unstructured data processes into software. Operations leaders utilize Extend to design and deploy intelligent AI agents to handle the work of a traditional BPO, including data classification, data extraction, and other forms of data intelligence. Extend’s AI-native platform allows operations leaders to build workflows around their unstructured data, allowing them to classify, extract, and transform data that is received from various formats and types much faster than previous technologies. Extend’s proprietary confidence-scoring model also allows enterprises to deploy into production confidently as they know that Extend will identify issues and loop in a person at the right time.

GoCharlie.ai | Brennan Woodruff, Co-Founder & Chief Business Officer 

We build cutting-edge AI solutions to augment and automate workflows for the modern professional. 

Graphio | Dmitry Norenko, CEO

Graphio is a powerful “what if” scenario builder for organizational planning. It predicts revenue impact, identifies top performers, and forecasts flight risk by analyzing data from various tools like HR, ERP, payroll, and more. With Graphio, visualize outcomes for reorganization, layoffs, and promotions before making critical decisions.

HydroX AI | Victor Bian, Chief of Staff 

HydroX AI is a VC-backed AI security startup based in Silicon Valley. Our founding team includes former executives and security experts from companies including Bytedance, Meta, and Linkedin. We are building a one-stop solution to help enterprises adopt and deploy GenAI safely and compliantly without the need to build or train a costly in-house AI security team. Our current platform can evaluate and discover risks in both open-source and closed AI models, provide effective mitigations, and subsequently monitor them for success.

Infera AI | Jialian Wu, CEO 

Infera builds data-driven AI platforms to support decision making and optimization for industries. We take a Bayesian approach to machine learning to deliver generative AI models that address the challenges associated with decision-making and optimization under uncertainty. Our team comes from a machine learning and engineering background from the University of Toronto, and we work towards a more efficient and sustainable future together with our industry partners.

InstaEnglish Inc. | Yutaro Nishiyama, Founder & Head of Technology

The InstaEnglish app is a personal coach in English learners’ pocket, which challenges them to translate thoughts in their mother tongue to English, offering instant, tailored feedback on their English from our fine-tuned large language model. One attempt takes only 30 seconds and the repetitive training turns passive vocabulary to active vocabulary efficiently. Alongside a Northwestern University Kellogg full-time MBA program, we developed InstaEnglish 100% in-house in just three months. Since its launch in February, it has quickly garnered over 1,000 downloads and more than 30 paying users within its first month, securing the top spot at the annual Kellogg Venture Competition.

inQuest AI | Dan Brown, CEO & Founder 

InQuest AI is a social platform that empowers individuals and organizations to learn how to use AI tools in meaningful ways, share their knowledge and experiences, and collectively innovate with AI. Our platform provides a space for users to discover and interact with a wide range of AI models and tools, learn from others’ experiences through shared AI conversations, and participate in practical AI challenges and contests. Organizations can use InQuest AI to crowdsource best practices, identify meaningful use cases, and accelerate AI adoption within their workforce. Individuals can use InQuest AI to upskill or reskill in AI, connect with other AI enthusiasts, and showcase their own AI creations and tools. With both public and private settings, InQuest AI offers a platform to enable social learning and personalized education that is tailored to the needs of both individuals and organizations.

Legman | Dan Shaw, CEO

Bid leveling is the biggest deterrent of growth for a general contractor because in order to grow you must win more bids, but currently to do more bids requires a timely manual process. This process is repeatable and shared among all general contractors. It is our thesis we can automate this and save hundreds of hours per project bid and allow for general contractors to put out a significant more amount of bids to grow their business using our solution.

Levee | Al Lagunas, CEO 

Levee is a computer vision AI company that automates housekeeping training & operations for hotels by removing its biggest bottleneck: room inspections. Levee uses proprietary models trained on the hotels’ unique data & quality control requirements to create self-inspection tools for the staff. This unlocks synergies like expedited training & onboarding, reduced manager workload, and streamlined check-in experiences for guests.

Livesitter | Charles Mopur, CEO

Livesitter observes cameras inside schools, pools, and buses and provides real-time alerts to prevent incidents and insights to engage better and grow revenue. 

Lumi AI | Ibrahim Ashqar, CEO

Lumi is an AI-powered enterprise analytics platform. We use generative AI to automate the process of writing the SQL queries needed to extract custom insights and reports from operational databases and data warehouses. This empowers users with the ability to instantly extract insights and generate custom reports using plain language. 

Matrice.ai | Reda Al-Bahrani, Co-Founder 

Matrice.ai is an end-to-end machine learning platform for the rapid development and integration of artificial intelligence into software products and business applications. Matrice.ai is an “AI for Everyone” platform geared towards supporting all kinds of developers – with zero experience to top-level machine learning experts. Developers can effortlessly use our platform for AI development via a Web application for no-code use or a Python SDK for programmatic use. We strive to provide the cheapest computing for AI development by leveraging our multi-cloud integrations such as AWS, GCP, Azure, OCI and Lambda Labs.

Minerva CQ | Cosimo Spera, CEO 

Minerva CQ focuses to provide its solution in three verticals: Healthcare, Telco, and Energy/E-mobility. 

Minerva CQ charges a baseline annual fee for the platform and a monthly fee based on the number of agents/transactions.

NeoLicense | James Keck, Founder 

NeoLicense helps the world’s leading companies understand their contracts. From helping visualize contractual relationships for M&As, identifying key legal terms without counsel, and compliance with software and cloud licenses, to name a few. With NeoLicense, our clients are making their dumb documents smart and gaining real business value. We work with the top Professional Services companies and are live in five Fortune 500 Clients across the energy, financial services, and healthcare industries.

NLX | Andrei Papancea, CEO 

NLX provides an end-to-end enterprise AI platform for creating, managing, deploying and analyzing chat, voice, and multimodal conversational applications. The platform enables brands to manage conversational deployments across their entire enterprise while providing unmatched modularity and access to state-of-the-art AI models from providers like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and the Open Source community.

Nutrād | John Abrams, Founder & CEO 

nutrād is intelligent supply chain software that deeply connects brands, distributors, and retailers – eliminating cumbersome, error-prone manual processes using advanced AI and ML. We provide CPG brands with a co-pilot tool that enables infinite product data distribution, mapping, validation, and improvement while reducing cost, error, and inefficiency. Developed by seasoned global supply chain experts, our platform is constructed on Databricks and AWS infrastructure.

OpenRisk Technologies | Narasimha Kodihalli, CEO 

OpenRisk is a purpose-built AI platform to illuminates dark data from unstructured sources such as legal documents, contracts, scanned images, notices, and financial statements. We digitize unstructured data, contextually connect all related information, and automate business processes. “Understanding Data in Context” is our secret sauce! We have started this journey by creating business solutions for the Corporate & Commercial Lending domain. We have delivered exponential value to a client (a tier-1 Canadian Commercial Bank) across multiple use cases. We have carefully chosen our starting point because of the team’s strength and the fact that Corporate & Commercial Lending is the only domain that has seen under 10% investment and adoption of AI technology. This means the market is very ripe and wide open for innovation. We aim to expand into insurance and healthcare domains in the foreseeable future.

Polygraf AI | Yagub Rahimov, CEO 

Polygraf AI Governance is our flagship on-prem software that enables organizations to detect, monitor, and mitigate potential confidential/business-critical/proprietary data leaks & breaches when engaging with commercial AI systems. Employees can harness the productivity of AI tool, ensuring that data privacy and compliance requirements are adhered to. Our product Integrates with the customers’ existing systems, security stack, and AI tools effortlessly via a Zero Trust, localized architecture.  Integrations into printing and scanning systems are also possible, providing an additional layer of data governance at the point of print and scan.

Salem Cyber | William Schwieder, Product Manager 

Security teams are constantly buried by mountains of cyber alerts, making it difficult to identify genuine threats. Salem is an AI decision intelligence platform that automates cyber alert investigations to escalate the few that require human attention. This allows security teams to focus on genuine threats, improving time to respond to threats by up to 24x and reducing the number of escalated alerts by 98% compared to traditional methods. We have successfully demonstrated our value proposition in the market, including for a Fortune 100 pharmaceutical company, and we expect to grow rapidly this year.

SpaceBot.ai | Dave Turner, Co-Founder 

SpaceBot.ai revolutionizes care in aging environments through advanced sensing capabilities and proprietary AI technology. Our platform addresses the critical challenge of labor shortages in assisted living facilities by aggregating diverse data types, from environmental conditions to resident interactions. This enables us to enhance the living experience for residents, offer peace of mind to their families, and empower facility operators to achieve more with less. By focusing on data-driven insights and operational efficiency, SpaceBot.ai ensures high-quality care and optimized resource use in today’s demanding care settings.

SQOR Technologies Inc. | Laz Fuentes, CEO 

SQOR Technologies will offer subscription bundles based on the number of SaaS tools used, encouraging clients to integrate all of their SaaS applications. We will provide unlimited seats across client companies, allowing leadership to not only receive alerts and insights but also to directly engage with the right person associated with each tool, asking pertinent questions as signals emerge, ensuring they are always informed. Initially, SQOR will primarily target Series B/C/D companies and the investors that back them, given that the average 100-person company utilizes over 130 SaaS tools and our Execution Scores offer a low-friction method to monitor the health of portfolio companies for investors.

TexChange Unbrokered | Christian Gaona, CEO 

TexChange Unbrokered is a B2B platform for firms in hard industries to buy and sell materials and services in the global market without brokers. 

xPub | Kalyan Gautham, Co-Founder & CEO

xPub helps publishers accelerate content research and generation through full-stack enterprise LLM platforms with proprietary models and custom workflows. With a network of industry and customer-specific enterprise LLMs and quantized models, their customers get the most desirable and quick outputs, ensuring high levels of accuracy, personalization, and data privacy. xPub is a Techstars portfolio company founded by three alumni of Cornell University.

xBlock | Dena Neek, CEO 

xBlock is a forward-looking startup that melds AI, ML, GenAI, and organizational psychology into voice-activated software, designed to revolutionize work and leadership within the hospitality sector. It streamlines employee development and management tasks, offering insights into operations and team growth. This enables managers to make informed decisions for both immediate and future planning, enhancing staff skills and operational efficiency. Through its innovative web app, xBlock equips hotels and restaurants with the tools needed for a more engaged workforce and effective management, addressing the industry’s dynamic challenges.

About the program 

Cohort members will participate in 4 weeks of hybrid programming, alternating each week for virtual and in-person experiences in April, May, and June 2024. The program culminates with a capstone-like event, the 2024 AI Innovation Summit, open to public participation on 6.27.24. 

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For inquiries about involvement in partnering with us or learning more about sponsor options for the AI Innovation Summit, connect with our team. 

About 1871 

1871, a nonprofit global innovation hub, exists to inspire, equip, and support early-stage, growth-stage, late-stage, and corporate innovators in building extraordinary businesses. 1871 is home to ~500 early-stage startups, ~250 growth and late-stage companies, and ~60 corporates, and is supported by an entire community focused on accelerating their growth and creating jobs in the Chicagoland area. The member experience includes virtual and in-person access to workshops, events, mentorship, and more. The nonprofit organization has 350 mentors available to its members, alongside access to more than 200 partner corporations, universities, education programs, accelerators, venture funds, and others. Since its inception in 2012, more than 1,050+ alum companies are still active, have created over 14,700 jobs, and have raised more than $3.7 billion in follow-on capital.