Second Transform 2019 AI showcase highlights people and processes

Following the morning showcase at VentureBeat’s Transform 2019 AI event, the next five companies — Mesmer, Aperture Data, Spoke, Kinetica, and Inference Solutions — took the stage this afternoon.

Mesmer

Mesmer emerged from stealth today, equipped with fully operational mobile application testing capabilities and $15 million in funding led by Intel Capital. The company employs robotic process automation (RPA) technology to perform the process of testing mobile applications more quickly and accurately than humans, but its strongest appeal is simply the fact that it obviates the need for human developers to perform the laborious and tedious tasks involved with tapping through every part and feature of their apps on multiple platforms.

Even though it’s been in stealth for the past two years, the company already has a roster of large clients and a strong revenue stream.

ApertureData

ApertureData wants to take machine learning to a new level by using a unified approach to visual data. Its solution is concerned with not just data, but metadata. This is a case of a company solving its own problem. “We could not find a unified solution that offers as rich an interface and set of functionalities that our platform does, as attested to by our customers. Any other solution required putting together an assortment of systems for metadata, image, and video serving as well as preprocessing (eg, OpenCV), and it was particularly hard to find a persistent index to perform similarity search on feature vectors,” the company told VentureBeat.

Using the open source Visual Data Management System, ApertureData offers users a clean interface, and it works with Python frameworks and has built-in support for image and video preprocessing.

Today, the company announced a beta program for the next phase of its development.

Spoke

Spoke wants to help businesses streamline their internal processes, like onboarding new employees. The company launched its AI-powered ticketing system out of beta in 2018, and today it announced new workflows to expand its offerings from ticketing to full workflows.

“The modern workplace demands fast, personalized access to knowledge and services,” said Spoke cofounder and CEO Jay Srinivasan. “The new workflows from Spoke allow support teams to help people faster without forcing people down unnecessarily complicated steps, so everyone has more time to get more things done.” Spoke works with Slack, email, and on the web to let teams across a company track progress and see results. It’s intended to break down friction points and barriers in communication and project completion across organizations.

The new capability makes it easier for companies to make not just knowledge requests, like an HR question, but also work requests, like setting up a training with the IT department.

Kinetica

Kinetica, which raised $50 million back in June 2017, provides businesses and organizations with real-time data analytics. More specifically, Kinetica’s platform combines historical data analytics, streaming data analytics, location intelligence, and artificial intelligence. It’s applicable for 5G network optimization, mitigating financial risk, and more. But with Kinetica, financial institutions can calculate risk in real time instead of, for instance, overnight. It works by applying machine learning to both streaming and historical data.

Announced today, the company is getting into the autonomous vehicle market, with the goal of helping autonomous vehicle companies achieve level 5 status.

Inference Solutions

Inference Solutions develops virtual agents for sales and service organizations. The company today announced a partnership with Pizza Hut Australia. In short, Australians who call Pizza Hut will have their call intelligently routed to either a contact center representative or a nearby Pizza Hut store location. The company also announced today that it offers WhatsApp integration through an API.

See video of every Showcase presentation on our YouTube playlist.