Demo Day
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On September 20, twelve companies took the stage to present what they'd been working on during Betaworks' AI Camp: Augment accelerator. The products ranged from healthtech to gaming, from deeptech engineering to enterprise SaaS, but each were focused expressly on using AI to superpower existing human workflows, behaviors and experiences.
Attributes We’re Thinking About
While we are open to investing in any company that aims to augment human activity through AI, here is a non-exhaustive list of some attributes we’re thinking about - if any of the following apply to your company you should consider applying.
How Camp Works
AI Camp: Augment will be a 3 month program here at Betaworks in NYC, where 8-10 pre-seed/seed companies will each receive $500,000 investment; be provided 1-on-1 mentorship time; tailored programming, events, and activities; collaborative opportunities with cohort companies and builders in our network. Betaworks Ventures and our friends at Greycroft, Differential VC, and Mozilla Ventures will fund the $500,000 investment each company will receive. Betaworks’ portfolio companies Hugging Face, Stability AI, and Nomic AI will also be providing cohort companies with early feature and accelerated compute access.
AI Camp: Augment will run from 6/28/23 - 9/22/23 and culminate with a Demo Day, where companies can showcase their work to potential customers, investors, and partners.
Applications Closed 5/31/23
AI Camp: Augment will be a 3 month program here at Betaworks in NYC, where 8-10 pre-seed/seed companies will each receive $500,000 investment; be provided 1-on-1 mentorship time; tailored programming, events, and activities; collaborative opportunities with cohort companies and builders in our network. Betaworks Ventures and our friends at Greycroft, Differential VC, and Mozilla Ventures will fund the $500,000 investment each company will receive. Betaworks’ portfolio companies Hugging Face, Stability AI, and Nomic AI will also be providing cohort companies with early feature and accelerated compute access.
AI Camp: Augment will run from 6/28/23 - 9/22/23 and culminate with a Demo Day, where companies can showcase their work to potential customers, investors, and partners.
Betaworks has been a foundational part of the NYC tech ecosystem for the last 15 years – first, as an incubator of brands you know and love like Giphy, Tweetdeck, Bit.ly, and Dots, and more recently as a pre-seed and seed stage investor in companies like HuggingFace and Stability AI, among many others.
We believe in thesis-based investing, and have spent the last seven years honing and iterating on our thesis around artificial intelligence. A significant amount of learning in that space came from Camp. We started with BotCamp (HuggingFace) in 2016 and have done seven other camps since (including VoiceCamp, VisionCamp, AudioCamp, SynthCamp, and more), most of which focus on a single mode of applied machine learning.
Camp is like an accelerator, but not. Rather than writing a small check into dozens, and sometimes hundreds, of companies across a wide variety of categories, we look at the evolution of technology and bet on a cohort of companies that are creating and/or defining a brand new category. We bring these founders together to learn from one another as they embark into uncharted territory, and tap them into our network of portfolio founders, tech big brains and, of course, investors.
We are interested in all facets of AI, but for this Camp, we are specifically interested in the products that augment the way humans behave, create, play, work, and think. Products that superpower humans, rather than replace them.
THINKCamp will run from 6/28/23 to 9/22/23.
THINKCamp will be 13 weeks long.
We'll be selecting a cohort of 8-10 companies.
AI Camp: Augment will be a hybrid experience, with the first and last weeks taking place at Betaworks' offices in New York City. Companies can participate remotely for the interim weeks, or work out of our offices for that period.
Fast! Fill out the application above with any relevant materials (demo/beta/links/deck/etc) and we'll review your application. We'll set up a maximum of 2 meetings for you to talk with our team, and give you a decision after that.
It's not required, but having something to show like a demo or beta or figma is highly encouraged.
We don't charge for AI Camp: Augment. Your only expense would be travel to/from NYC.
Betaworks Ventures will invest $250k on an uncapped SAFE note with a 25% discount, and receive a 5% common stock stake in the business. In addition, we're very excited to be working alongside our friends at Greycroft, Differential VC, and Mozilla Ventures, who will be adding $250k total on the exact same SAFE terms. To summarize, participating companies will receive a total of $500k on an uncapped SAFE note with a 25% discount from Betaworks + Greycroft + Mozilla Ventures, and Betaworks will receive 5% of the company's common stock.
Sponsored by:
For any other questions, feel free to send a note to jordan@betaworks.com or neel@betaworks.com
Betaworks Camp is a thematic investment and in-residence program for startups building in frontier technologies.
Each camp consists of three months “in-residence” at Betaworks to help early stage companies with product development, platform strategy, data science, branding, and fundraising. Entrepreneurs have access to the Betaworks team, its network and to a carefully curated group of industry leaders to assist with both general company-building needs and with topics specific to each theme. Each camp company receives pre-seed funding of $250k.
Past themes have ranged amongst privacy tech, natural language processing, computer vision, synthetic audio & video, and generative AI. Camp companies have gone on to raise over $100M in funding from leading investors:
Earlier this year, Betaworks kicked off THINKCamp, our latest accelerator program focused on the Tools for Thinking Category. We brought in a cohort of 9 stellar companies building software aimed at helping people think, ideate, create, and share information better. In late 2022, each company presented live demos to a room full of investors, tech enthusiasts, and fellow builders.
Backing companies using new technologies - ranging from large language models and generative AI to graph databases to high fidelity spatial user interfaces – to create real tools for thinking.
Betalab is an early-stage cohort-based investment program combined with a year-long series of workshops and events at Betaworks — with the singular goal of catalyzing startup activity around Fixing The Internet.
We called out into the soundscape looking for the best entrepreneurs, builders, and creatives working on companies defining the future of audio- and voice-first tech.
We were beginning to see both research and real-world examples of a certain type of AI, generative adversarial networks (GANs), being employed to create or manipulate images, audio, video and text and do so in increasingly realistic ways. Our call was for early-stage teams building in this space.
Startups defining the future of how we interact with and through live platforms
With the ubiquity of cameras and motion sensors, and the advent of computer vision technology, we were investigating what it means for a camera to not only capture its environment, but to be able to understand and augment what it is looking at.
Voicecamp was designed to support early-stage companies working at the forefront of conversational software, but those related to voice-based applications and services. Betaworks partnered with the Google Assistant and GE for the program.
Betaworks first accelerator for early stage companies building chat-based products and conversational interfaces.
Previous Program Partners
