Category: Minneanalytics

A.I. Startups of Several Flavors Pitch Passionately in Minneapolis

June 22, 2024 / Graeme / 0 Comments

It was my pleasure to host an awesome group of founders at a conference on June 7, 2024 — all of them focused in data and AI. The conference attracted more than 1200 attendees. It was the seventh edition of the MinneAnalytics DATA TECH Conference, which took place at the Best Buy HQ Campus in Richfield, MN.

As a board member of MinneAnalytics, I again organized and hosted a “Startup Showcase” that morning. It was the 16th such session over the past decade that I’ve had the privilege of putting together. All told, MinneAnalytics has given a platform to a total of 139 startups in these showcases, which collectively have raised hundreds of millions in capital and created thousands of jobs. Already, a dozen of these startups have had successful exits via acquisition.

Our startup session this time continued the strong attendance we had at our last event, the April 19 Healthcare Conference (which I wrote about in my previous post). Attendance was again standing room during most of this session, and even more crowded for the VC Panel at the end.

Please do click on the links below to learn about each of these promising startups! They’re representative of the wide array of data & AI startups that are popping up all over these days. After the event, I asked each presenter, What was one good thing that happened to you because of your participation in this session, or one interesting contact you made?

STARTUP PRESENTERS’ FEEDBACK

Luke Roquet, Datavolo (Minnesota & Arizona): “We met some really interesting people from across town, but hearing what Philips Healthcare is doing and how we might be able to help them with their image processing pipelines was my top takeaway from the event.”

Kristopher Purens, Uroboros Innovations (Chicago): “We made several great connections with new people and reconnected with old contacts. Really valuable event for us. Panel discussion was very helpful, too.”

Dan Feehan, Code4pro (Minnesota): “Fantastic event. Loved the organization and straightforwardness of it all and the complement of the panel and timely AI discussion. I also loved how easy it was to connect with folks and understand their part of the ecosystem. I even ran into my best friend from 7th grade that I haven’t seen in 30 years! Great job by all presenters!”

Michael Petersen, Raise a Hood (Minnesota): “We came away from the event with a dozen new connections — potential investors, potential customers, and even potential partners. It was a day very well invested!”

Jeremy Vaughan, Start Left Security (Jacksonville FL): “Great event, great community! MinneAnalytics provides an example of what other cities can do for their tech folks and startups. Start Left Security made great connections with new partners and even have some investors chasing us down now!”

Toriano Sanzone, Dot Dog (New Orleans): “The Startup Showcase was truly impressive. I do wish I had brought more business cards and USB drives with my pitch deck, as the networking opportunities were exceptional. Presenting my company DOT DOG and Dog Training AI has boosted my confidence in the direction I am heading. Attending MinneAnalytics events is a priority for the rest of 2024, and I look forward to the possibility of presenting again in 2025.”

Jolly Nanda, Altheia (Minnesota): “It was a great event. I liked the opportunity to connect with my fellow startups, VCs, and supporters. I enjoyed the networking between sessions as well.”

George Asante, Affine Health Intelligence (Evanston IL): “It was great to be included in such a remarkable event.”

My sincere thanks to these amazing founders! They pitched their hearts out and captivated our audience.

PANELISTS’ COMMENTS

The panel following the startup pitches packed the room even further. The topic was, “How Are Investors Evaluating Startups in the Age of Data and AI?” After the event, I asked each panelist, What was the single best insight or comment you would cite from the discussion?

Ryan Weber, Great North Ventures (Minnesota): “I loved hearing from John about Piper’s cautious adoption given security concerns and protecting their clients — and from Ryan Broshar about how one of their portfolio companies is addressing it. Also loved Nick’s comment on the due diligence “BS call,” where they bring in an expert to chat with [a startup pitching them] to ensure they aren’t just big talkers. We do that, too, but I never thought of it so bluntly. It makes very clear the intention of that call. With all the hype and new jargon, [such a step] makes a lot of sense in this age of AI.”

Nick Moran, New Stack Ventures (Chicago): “I believe it was Ryan Weber that emphasized the importance of data in an AI strategy. This is an area we’ve been spending on a lot of time in as we think about defensibility and long-term moats. The comments really resonated and made me think about how that applies to our investments.”

Ryan Broshar, Matchstick Ventures (Minneapolis & Boulder) : “I liked the discussion around the adoption of AI by enterprises, and that we know they will be late adopters when it comes to any product they are building — but probably don’t know the extent to which their employees are already using it to improve productivity.”

John Gast, Piper Sandler (Minneapolis): “I enjoyed the discussion and appreciate how you moderated it, Graeme. It struck me that our collective remarks underscored how quickly this market is moving. We didn’t dwell on the fervor around LLMs in the last 12 to 24 months – instead, we had a rational discussion about the application of this technology to real problems.”

Really excellent panel! Thanks again, guys — and to all who attended and asked great questions.

I hope those of you reading this post can join us at our next Startup Showcase. Watch for an announcement in a future MinneAnalytics newsletter. If you aren’t on that list, please do sign up here. Join the almost 20,000 in the amazing MinneAnalytics community!

Hit the comments and let me know what you think, or if you have a question. Thanks!

Eight Up-and-Coming Healthcare & Medtech Startups I Hosted Recently

May 2, 2024 / Graeme / 3 Comments

Among many other things I do, I serve on the Board of a wonderful organization called MinneAnalytics, a community of some 20,000 data and business professionals. The seventh edition of our Healthcare Data Science Conference took place Friday, April 19, 2024 at the Best Buy headquarters campus in suburban Minneapolis. More than 1000 attended.

In my role as Startup Showcase Organizer, I hosted yet another session of startup pitches at this conference. It was the 15th such session we’ve had over the past decade. (We do them at all our major conferences, not just the events we do focused in healthcare.) Not counting this session, we’ve now featured a total of 114 startups, which collectively have raised hundreds of millions in capital and created thousands of jobs. About 10% of them have had successful exits via acquisition so far.

Big Crowd

The startup session at the recent conference had what I think was the largest attendance of any we’ve ever done. It was standing room only throughout the two and half hours. I attribute that both to the quality of the startups, and to the amazing medtech ecosystem we have here in Minnesota.

The startup presenters and their companies were as follows. I encourage you to visit their websites to learn more the amazing work each is doing!

• Mark Summers, Dosentrx

• Tony Hyk, TheraTec

• Jeremiah Scholl, AESOP Technology

• Keith Kallmes, Nested Knowledge

• Lia Butler, NeoPrediX

• Laura Stoltenberg, Cryosa

• Ping Yeh, Vocxi Health

• Chris Darland, Peerbridge Health

A VC Panel Discusses Funding Issues

A panel I organized took place after the startup pitches. It packed the room even further — very little standing room was left! The topic was, “The Current Funding Environment for Healthcare and Medtech Startups.”

I asked each panelist, What was the single best insight or comment you would cite from the discussion?

Frank Jaskulke, Medical Alley Association: “Having heard Stephanie Rich share that they may see 2500 companies in a year to invest in 3 or 4 — that really highlights the competition startups face. But it also speaks to the importance of engaging the right investors, not just any investors. A startup can waste a lot of time chasing the wrong targets.”

Stephanie Rich, Bread & Butter Ventures: “The biggest thing I was struck by was the interest in venture and healthcare by our ecosystem and attendees! The attendance and questions were amazing.” [Stephanie sat in for her colleague Mary Grove, who called in at the last minute with a cold.]

Dave Dalvey, Brightstone Venture Capital: “The tracking and market implications of ‘overhang’ or ‘dry powder’ as it’s called in the venture capital industry are important to understand. Too much or too little un-invested capital held by active venture managers, at a time when a new company is in the market for funding, has a significant impact on the pricing, terms, and general receptiveness of a fund manager to a new opportunity.”

Greg Banker, Vensana Capital: “I liked Dave’s comment about making sure to research VCs before you go out to fundraise, to ensure you’re a match for their criteria — or that you’re similar to other investments they’ve made in the past. For example, if you’re raising a seed investment and the fund you’re trying to talk with has never done anything but Series B and beyond — well, not likely a fit.”

We had some great questions after each pitch, and after the panel. Thanks again to all who participated and attended!

The next Startup Showcase will be held at the largest annual MinneAnalytics event of them all: Data Tech, to be held on June 7, 2024 at the same venue. It will draw 1200+ registrants and feature 40+ speakers, in addition to the startup pitch session.

If you’re able to attend, look me up!

The State — or Lack of a State — of Marketing Analytics

September 11, 2015 / Graeme / 2 Comments

Image @VentureBeat

How does one assess the landscape for an exploding technology category like marketing analytics? There’s so much confusion and hype around the topic. You’ve heard it all — too much data, we’re drowning in it, woe is us. And, along with that, too many vendors trying to sell us the latest cure. First we were shocked to hear the number of vendors was 1000, now we’re told it’s 2000! The argument that all these vendors create too many data silos is now a refrain we’re hearing more often. Hard to argue with that.

With such high numbers of players comes confusion, and complexity.

But it begs the question: how in the world do you unify all your marketing data to understand it and gain a competitive edge for your organization? Will a platform or single vendor solution emerge? Some of the big players like Oracle, Adobe, and Salesforce are certainly trying, opting in a big way for buy vs. build. (These three have led a frenzy of acquisitions in the marketing technology space.)

Yet significant roadblocks still exist to widespread adoption of marketing analytics in business today — and for companies to extract real value from it. The lack of data science skills we’ve all heard about by now till we’re blue in the face — it’s the “sexiest job title in the country,” blah blah blah. Big shortages, universities scrambling to launch graduate programs, etc, etc. But should this technology really require a PhD in every marketing department and agency in the land? That simply doesn’t compute! Why can’t there be more solutions, more tools, that marketers and general business folks — regular Joes and Janes — can use? Why does it all have to be so complex? Continue reading

Big Data Storms the Big Apple This Week

March 16, 2014 / Graeme / 0 Comments

And I'm looking forward to reporting on this high-level gathering: the Gigaom Structure Data conference. It's billed thusly: "The industry's leading denizens share their views on big data and its impact on the information economy."

That's right: big minds sharing deep thoughts on a humongously hyped topic — what could be more fun than that? But it won't be just big companies represented at this fine event, there'll be lots of smaller ones, too — including my favorite kind: #startups. And you know what they say: pretty much every tech startup today is a data startup of one sort or another — or will be. That's what happens when a topic is hyped as breathlessly as Big Data is — it permeates damn near everthing. Even your mother has asked you about it.

So, why am I going? Well, first of all, I've had a media pass to a Gigaom event before, and was impressed by the quality of their events. And this one gave me a chance to visit my son and his wife, who recently took up residence in Manhattan, where I haven't been in years. (I like my conferences mostly in California and Colorado, thank you very much.) That, plus the fact that I've been focusing a lot of my attention in data and analytics of late, right here in Minnesota. We have a large contingent of big data professionals in the state — mostly big-company types at our 20 Fortune 500s, of course, but some very interesting startups as well. I've become quite involved with a wonderful professional meetup-type group called Minneanalaytics.org over the past couple of years. Get this: our database now numbers 3700 data professionals across 600 organizations! (Follow Minneanalytics on Twitter.) It's a great group of people — lots of energy and smarts around the burgeoning, rapidly growing field of Big Data. I'm on the organizing commitee and have assisted with several Minneanalytics events, which have attracted up to 900 attendees. I'm specifically involved in engaging more of the startup community with the organization, and I also help manage the organization's social media presence.

My involvement in Minneanalytics and helping with content curation and community engagement got me to thinking beyond just our Twitter and email list communications, however. What might be another way I could help spread the love — and the need to keep up on the latest — around this thing crazy, hot topic of Big Data?

As a huge user of the Flipboard app since day-one of the iPad in 2010, it hit me: why not launch a Flipboard magazine on the topic? I hadn't done one before. I noted there were others who had already started Big Data magazines, but they were way geeky. I thought there might be room for one with a little different focus: on real-world uses for Big Data — how the technologies were being applied in ways that even everyday people could understand, in a wide variety of fields, professions, and vertical markets. I figured there was more than enough to content to begin — and I was right.

So one day, on a lark, I launched my first Flipboard magazine, Big Data in the Wild (shown at right). I subtitled it "Real-world examples of how big data is making big impact." Fast forward: in just four months, it has more than 4600 subscribers and almost 89,000 page flips. Flipboard features it regularly on its Daily Picks, and Mike McCue, Flipboard's CEO, has even told me "great magazine!" So, I'm committed now! (As the magazine got establshed, I asked a colleague, Dan Atkins, one of the cofounders of Minneanalytics, to be a contributor to it.)

But after I recently committed to making the trip to the Big Apple, I started thinking… hmmm, being a magazine publisher now — haha, I mean a content curator — how could I, as a longtime reporter and blogger at tech conferences, not cover this event for my own magazine? It was just too much of a crazy notion not to do it. So, here's what I'll be doing this week: publishing blog posts during and after the event and, you got it, flipping those posts into my magazine.

But wait, there's more! How can a magazine exist without a Twitter account? That would be just cruel. So, a week or two ago, I started @BigDataWild on Twitter, and have since built up a nice little, well focused following of professionals, which continues to grow. Naturally, I'll be tweeting links that will — yep! — take people to the magazine!! …to the posts I'll be writing about the event. Now how recursive is that? But who am I not to create more data! Post, publish, link, flip, tweet, link back — feed the stream!

If you'll be at Gigaom Structure Data, be sure to say hello. I'd enjoy meeting! You can still register here. And, if you need convincing the agenda is worthwhile, read these two recent posts from Gigaom writers that will give you a flavor of what to expect:

• 5 Things that Will Remake Big Data in the Next 5 years

• Upcoming Gigaom Event: Three Innovators Who Are Shifting the Big Data Landscape

Here's to a really BIG time!