Demo Day
Watch Now
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
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.
Armilla Assurance has built software and services that help businesses manage risk caused by AI. The company, founded by serial entrepreneurs Karthik Ramakrishnan (former VP at Element AI) and Dan Adamson (former Microsoft dev lead), offers three products – Armilla Verified assesses the quality and reliability of a company’s AI-enabled products; Armilla Guaranteed is a warranty on top of that assessment; and Armilla Insured is insurance coverage against any losses incurred by the non-performance of an AI model.
Bionic Health is an AI-driven preventative healthcare service founded by Robbie Allen (founder of Automated Insights, which was acquired by Vista Equity Partners) and Jared Pelo (founder of iScribes, acquired by Nuance Communications). Bionic is democratizing access to preventative medicine for health conscious adults. The company has established a clinic in North Carolina with dozens of patients to train their AI on actual, real-world practices, protocols and workflows of doctors, practitioners and patients via asynchronous telehealth. Bionic has built the first EHR backed by a vector database, utilizing embeddings for efficient searching and precise insights for both clinicians and patients. The startup has thus far raised $3.5 million in pre-seed funding.
Deftly is an AI/ML-powered platform that analyzes, aggregates and scales insights around product feedback for businesses seeking to better serve their customers. The company was founded by MIT alums, Christie (previously engineer/product manager at Retool, ArthurAI, Microsoft), and Fern (previously engineer at Calendly, Google) who both felt this pain at early growth stage start-ups, as well as large enterprises. Product teams are responsible for prioritizing features and fixes on the company's roadmap, but are unable to distill meaningful insights from troves of dispersed product feedback. Deftly synthesizes this data collected across various departments (Product, Success, Support, Sales) to help companies prioritize the customer. The company has raised $500k.
Globe is using LLMs to power software that allows teams to gather, exchange and understand complex information. Founders and University of Waterloo students Brian Machado (intern at GoogleX, Uber, Tesla, and Samsung) and Ivan Yevenko saw a gap in collaboration tools for intricate projects. Rather than focus on a single problem point of collaborative information sharing around a project, such as file flexibility (Notion), file insurance (Rewind.AI), or communication channels (Slack, etc.), Globe is tackling the vast amount of information associated with a project by making it as easy to navigate and understand as Google Maps, zooming in and out of whatever data one needs intuitively. The company has raised $510k.
GroupLang is building software that tackles the way that LLMs interact with groups of people, rather than individuals. Founder Nikete della Penna and Bruno Mazorra understand that alignment of LLMs to a single, well-defined set of preferences is challenging enough on its own, and that same alignment with a group of people requires serving less well-defined preferences and yields fundamental incentive constraints. The company is tackling the big questions of how an LLM can serve a group and learn from a group.
Open Souls, founded by Kevin Fischer, is an open-source software framework that enables developers to create conversational AI projects and products that autonomously think and behave like real people. The company’s open-source framework fundamentally transforms LLMs by instilling digital souls – artificial minds with their own thoughts, feelings, and personality. Developers building simulations, such as closing a sale or having a difficult conversation with an employee at work, can tap into OpenSouls to ensure those simulations mirror the real-life conversations between two humans, with emotional intelligence and motivations.
Pangaea is a game studio that is leveraging AI to build faster, quicker, and smarter. The first title in the roadmap is a rogue-like Battle Royale that uses procedural generation to ensure that the map, and the challenges that lie within it, are never the same. The primary costs of developing multiplayer, live-services games are driven by art and backend technology, accounting for roughly 75 percent of the total dev cost of a game. Pangaea tackles that with its proprietary backend tech and efficient use of third-party AI. Pangaea’s cofounders, Joe Scott and Chris Spears, have led development on big-name games in the past, including Star Wars The Force Unleashed, NBA Jam, Thor God Of Thunder, and the rest of the team includes industry veterans from such acclaimed games as Star Wars The Old Republic, DC Universe, Toontown Online, and more.
Plastic Labs aims to enhance the viability, stickiness and utility of LLM-based applications by securely managing the flow of intimate psychological data between users and models. The company, founded by Courtland Leer (educator & philosopher), Vince Trost (machine learning engineer), and Vineeth Voruganti (Systems engineer), is developing a framework for fluid personalization across the whole ecosystem of AI apps. It leverages theory of mind capabilities to power individually-aligned custodial agents able to operate autonomously and confidentially on each user's behalf.
Shader, a new AI-enhanced social camera. Shader app lets anyone develop AR filters that they can use across Shader’s social graph, or post to other apps like Instagram. Traditionally, developing an AR filter was a desktop activity, requiring coding experience and design experience. With Shader, anyone can create a filter using text, taps, or their voice. It provinces a new way to make videos with its AI-first video creation tool that anyone can use. Shader was founded by Darya Sesitskaya (AR Platform Design Lead at Snap). The app is currently in private beta. The company has raised $580k.
Unakin is building an AI workforce for every game studio, aiming to cut development time in half. The first product is a UI programming agent, which creates functional UI (including code) from text or design prompts. The ultimate goal is to build a network of autonomous agents, powered by custom models, that are capable of multimodal understanding, collaborative work and tackling highly technical tasks. Unakin’s founding team consists of Oliver Markham (second time founder), Gian Luigi D'Alessandro (PhD, Cern) & Ted Poncu (PhD AI).
Vera is a platform that accelerates the adoption of AI in the workplace by governing what goes into and comes out of generative models. Using Vera gives companies unprecedented visibility and control over how staff and customers interact with generative AI, supporting more than 1400 commercially available models out of the box, including custom models built by companies in-house. The Vera platform mitigates privacy, security, bias, and policy risks at scale. Vera was founded by Liz O'Sullivan, previously cofounder of Arthur AI and noted policy advisor to governments worldwide, and Justin Norman, who previously led AI at Yelp, ML Research at Cloudera, and was the first titled Data Scientist at Cisco.
Waverly is building a social network of ideas where users can employ generative AI to remix ideas and create great posts. The company, founded by Element AI cofounder and ex-Googler Philippe Beaudoin, gives users control over their feed via conversational AI. Beaudoin saw in his work on Google Chrome how algorithmically powered feeds can lead to unhealthy online spaces and aims to rethink this paradigm via Waverly. Beaudoin's cofounder Philippe Gagnon worked in the video game industry for 21 years as a technical architect at Ubisoft.
