Category: The 10 Most Innovative AI Companies to Watch in 2022_Profile

With a vision to provide financial market professionals with data-driven tools to optimize their trading operations, Mosaic Smart Data was founded in 2014 by its CEO, Matthew Hodgson. The organization’s technology enables participants to harness their market and transaction data and see in real-time what happened, why it happened, and what is likely to happen next.

Before founding Mosaic, Matthew worked extensively in the fixed income markets for multiple prestigious global financial institutions. He saw first-hand the potential for trading firms to extract the value from their largely untapped transaction data assets. Being able to refine this raw data and distill it into meaningful smart data, where value can be extracted in the form of actionable insights, is a significant challenge that all market participants face. Matthew founded Mosaic Smart Data to enable firms to gain a significant competitive advantage through a better understanding of their transaction data.

Dependable Platform for Clients

By leveraging the latest AI and machine learning capabilities, Mosaic Smart Data technology enriches and personalizes the analytic insights its users receive. The company delivers this in real-time through the MSX® platform and its best-in-class smart data analytics platform MSX360®. Imagine having the world’s best digital quant sitting beside you guiding you to opportunity and action – this is precisely what Mosaic delivers.

A Transformative Industry

Matthew has always believed AI would be transformative in the financial services space because of its ability to deliver the kind of hyper-personalization usually only offered by consumer technology platforms. Today, the idea of walking into a video shop and trawling through shelves feels completely antiquated – everyone is used to a service like Netflix doing the legwork for them and suggesting options they will want to watch from a database of thousands.

Similarly, MSX360 allows Mosaic’s clients to see patterns of client behavior which could be seasonal, monthly, or weekly. This allows a bank to predict the best time of day for a trade and the most suitable instrument to use. The model learns from individual users’ activities and interests over time to constantly improve recommendations. This means banks become more efficient because they can target the right resources to the right opportunity and the right time.

The Shift to Digital Working

Matthew believes, during the era of Covid-19 and the subsequent shift towards a digital working environment, banks have to be smarter than ever when it comes to gaining a comprehensive view of their data and extracting value from it. Matthew says, “While people are speculating that the end of the ‘new normal’ might be on the horizon, the impact it has on the way we work and where we work is undoubtedly set to remain, with efficiency being the key. AI can deliver a huge range of efficiency benefits.”

According to Matthew, during the stressed market conditions of the past two years, the ability to wring every actionable insight from data is becoming vital to a firm’s survival and success. AI-powered data analytics is a perfect solution for this challenge.

Awards and Accolades

Mosaic Smart Data’s biggest accolade is its client base, which includes the biggest financial institutions across the world – including the US, Europe, Asia, South America, and South Africa. The organization has won several prestigious industry accolades, including the Banking Tech Awards, the FS Tech Awards, the InvestHK UK Fintech Awards, and being named Fintech Company of the Year by City AM.

The Changing Demographics of the Industry

Matthew believes forward-thinking banks of all sizes are now starting to deploy AI to enable predictive and prescriptive analytics, as well as connecting systems to prompt them as to the next best action for their clients. By absorbing information that might otherwise be missed, AI delivers the analysis to drive new sales engagement with clients and by delivering those insights at the optimum time.

According to a recent survey, 75% of banks with more than $100 billion in assets are currently implementing AI strategies, and investment and adoption at scale are expected to increase significantly over the coming years. This comes as no surprise when you consider it has been estimated by McKinsey that AI can potentially unlock $1 trillion of incremental value for banks. These tools can be thought of like a GPS for the sales desk – those banks without it will struggle to compete against more forward-leaning firms who are empowering their employees with the most advanced digital tools.

Matthew thinks, banks that fail to make AI central to their core strategy and operations—often referred to as becoming “AI-first”—will risk being overtaken by competition and deserted by their customers in the coming years.

The current operating environment is both uncertain and challenging for investment banks, but a carefully planned program that builds on cutting-edge data analytics and AI technology holds the key to driving growth and delivering the modern, information-driven trading experience that clients demand.

Matthew also says, “After all, it’s typically during periods of stress where relationships are forged. As a bank, if you’re able to guide a client through the fog of confusion, you will likely have a relationship for life – and AI and machine learning can assist in facilitating this.”

With the intent of providing personalized education at a scale, Amsterdam-based Kimo, was established in 2018. With +1 billion in need of upskilling in digital domains in the coming decade, Kimo believes that’s a big deal. In practice, personalization means Kimo’s system can tailor learning content to the specific context and needs of the student. Behind the scenes, that means Kimo needs to have millions of content items in all formats (e.g. videos, courses, books, articles, podcasts, market reports, etc.), difficulty levels, and price points. The essence of the company is thus content curation.

Purpose Driven Leader

Kimo is being led by its CEO, Rens ter Weijde, who started his career as a sports psychologist, working with athletes to improve their performance. Rens worked in professional football, field hockey, free diving, base jumping, and with artists in Cirque du Soleil. After some successes Rens joined McKinsey & Company to do similar work with their clients. A few years later he left the organization to build his own impact + strategy consulting company called Purpose+. Rens led this company for 6 years, he and his colleagues worked for 80 clients, including G20 summits. After that Rens was looking for, something new and challenging and realized that EdTech needed a significant upgrade.

Rens believe, the AI industry is one of the most fast-moving industries in the world today, with some improvement areas (e.g. parameters in large language models) seeing a CAGR of +100%. It’s also an area where many great minds work together and share knowledge, e.g. through code and papers. For Rens, he sees it as an extension of psychology, which is his original domain of interest. One could see AI research as a decentralized way of testing many psychological hypotheses, done by many developers globally and with lots of budget behind it.

AI Industry Trends

Rens realizes many things are happening, depending on the angle you take – tech, philosophy, competition, regulation, etc.

He believes a few relevant trends are changing the AI industry; First of all, the data-centric AI approach advocated by Andrew Ng is an interesting change of perspective in Rens’ view, as much progress depends on the quality of the data now.

Second, the race for specialized silicon to run AI software more efficiently (cloud or edge) is intriguing to watch as well, coming from both big players like Nvidia and Google as some new kids on the block.

Third, the rapid rise of large language models in recent years (e.g. GPT3, Megatron-Turing, Wu Dao) based on the transformer infrastructure is something to keep an eye on, as similar things may happen in other domains.

Fourth, zooming out to a geopolitical level, there is clear competition for AI progress and talent between nations, with many countries drafting an AI strategy and significant budget allocations.

As a final trend, Rens mentions the regulatory landscape ,which is emerging, combined with the preference of some companies to reduce their dependency on big data.

AI has millions of use cases for society. Rens believe the general trend to be, one of ‘human + machine’ augmentation, not direct competition for jobs. For customer service specifically, there are many ways to

• Pre-segment calls based on text
• Provide smart support to CS agents through AI suggestions, sentiment monitoring, etc

Helping People to Learn New Things

KIMO is a meta-level platform, it doesn’t make its content and Rens believe they don’t have to. As an organization, Kimo realized a few things that were not common knowledge, in education companies.

First, there is enough learning content for most areas on the web, making more is not necessarily the solution to drive engagement.

Second, the web is heavily polluted and ad-heavy, thus curation and/or finding direction for people is hard.

Third, people spend 5 hours per week, 260 per year, on average on the web, ‘trying to learn new things, versus 10-20 hours per year, in the organization they work for.

Fourth, people mostly look for ‘short content’ instead of, long content (e.g. courses, which have a 95% dropout).

Fifth, most people patch together content in different formats depending on the context, e.g. a podcast for a bus ride, or a book chapter for the weekend.

Effect of the Pandemic

Even during the pandemic, Kimo’s funding perspectives were still positive due to low a low-interest-rate environment, excess capital, etc. AI did some amazing work during the pandemic to speed up progress in certain areas, although largely out of sight. Rens also believe it will inspire new AI in healthcare trends, in the coming years, see e.g. AlphaFold from DeepMind.

Mission and Vision

Kimo’s mission is to provide personalized learning at scale, with a strong focus on emerging economies where access to high-quality education is harder. The firm believes that having a system that curates all the learning content on the web (note: 95% is free) is the way to go, given that the web contains everything but is also heavily polluted.

Future Roadmap

When it comes to the future, Kimo is headed to full-scale personalized learning, on N = 1 level, reaching 5 million users minimum in the next 2 years. On being future-ready, the firm is deeply embedded in expert networks in the tech industry, and it invites two guest speakers a week for its students on a wide range of topics.

With the intent of providing firmographic and technographic data on SMBs, Soleadify was Co-founded by Florin Tufan in 2018. Previously Florin was the Chief Product Officer at T-Me Studios, which is one of the largest mobile app publishers in Europe. Florin has been working in tech for the past 10 years, in various roles: sales, business, marketing, and product. He completed his Bachelor’s degree from Academia de Studii Economice din București, and Marketing from IAA School.

By leveraging the most modern AI and ML technologies, Soleadify constantly crawls the internet to produce 50+ data points on 70M+ companies from around the world. The firm’s clients usually integrate its APIs to streamline internal processes in industries like SMB lending, insurance, management consulting but the firm also has multiple partners in the financials technologies space that use its APIs to build new features in their existing products, features that make use of Soledify’s data enrichment capabilities and ESG data feeds for mid-market companies.

Helping Clients to Create Value

As a firm, Soleadify’s main goal is to focus on clear business outcomes, Florin has witnessed a lot of executives that push the use of AI tools just for the sake of the technology without questioning if that particular tool can bring value to the business.

Like many other geeky CEOs, Florin is also fascinated by innovative tools and use cases but, at the same time, as the leader of the company, doesn’t want to over-engineer Soleadify’s activities so it can be said that his main goal when considering new AI tools is to choose the one that aligns with the firm’s business objectives, help it create value for its customers and can be easily integrated into the existing workflows.

Emerging AI Trends

According to Florin, the future will see AI advancements in two very important and different niches;

• NLP: One of the biggest emerging trends in AI is, of course, language modelling. A particularly difficult challenge in AI since language is intrinsically a very human concept that we “force” computers to adapt to. Florin and his team at Soleadify believe GPT-3 will have a significant impact on AI adoption since it opens the door to so many new use cases, particularly in the world of marketing. And this is where Soleadify fits as well, with more on the understanding rather than creating side, the firm’s ML models are trained to be able to understand the global business world at huge scale and speed.
• Real-World Understanding with Advanced Computer Vision: AI is making it possible for driverless cars and heavy industry automation to heavily increase production speeds for the goods humans need.
• The Use at Scale of Deep Neural Networks: AI is being used to automate the most repetitive decision-making processes across enterprises, allowing easier data interpretation when combining inputs from different and varied sources, such as text, images, and numerical business outcomes (e.g. revenue, order value).

When Covid Came as a Blessing in Disguise

Right after the first Covid outbreak, Soleadify used its NLP and big data capabilities to build a search engine for various medical supplies, which was used by thousands of companies in need.

For Soleadify’s specific niche, Covid-19 has been a blessing in disguise, because the pandemic accelerated digitalization for most businesses, especially for SMBs, which had 2 choices at the start of this pandemic, focus on your online presence or go bankrupt. With this shift, the firm experienced a substantial increase in business data that it could collect and sort.

From Florin’s knowledge, this influx of data happened all over the internet since the beginning of this pandemic, so anyone that’s in the AI industry can be more than thankful to have access to increasing volumes of valuable data, that eventually will be used to build more efficient models and tools.

Tackling Challenges and Getting Prepared for the Future

One of the specific challenges Soleadify is facing right now is company classifications at scale. The models it builds can accurately predict most types of businesses, but there are still edge cases for new emerging industries and companies, one good example would be blockchain companies that still don’t have a specific industry classification. Another issue that challenges Soleadify’s models is the language barrier, the firm’s goal is to collect data on businesses from all over the world, and right now it is trying to find creative solutions to increase its coverage in countries with emerging economies.

Florin says, “In the next years we want to explore new opportunities based on our core technical capabilities, I’m talking about AI-based data extraction, sorting, and delivery. Starting from that three main pillars our goal is to build tools that facilitate access to data about any business in the world.”

Some of these tools that Soleadify is planning to build are:

• an open search engine for companies so that global company information is easily available online, at scale.
• Launching a few free company data APIs to democratize the usage of company data.
• Partnerships with major complementary players for data enrichment.
• Launching a “market trends” offering, where Soleadify can use its data to publish insights on the dynamic business world that it studies.

Artificial Intelligence or AI is a term that describes a machine’s learning, reasoning, logic, creativity, and perception, which were once thought of as unique to humans but now replicated by machines and is used in every industry.

AI is a game-changer in all industries. Nowadays, the amount of data that is generated, by both humans and machines, far outpace humans’ ability to absorb, interpret, and make complex decisions based on that data. Artificial intelligence forms the basis for all machine learning and is the future of all complex decision-making. Today AI technology offers several critical benefits that make it an excellent tool for any modern organization. That’s not all, AI also allows organizations to make better-informed decisions, thus improving businesses by quite a few folds by increasing the speed and accuracy of decision-making processes.

It was on April 2018, when Eugen L. Gross, Co-founded aiconix, which enables its customers to enrich their audiovisual content to make it detectable, searchable, and usable.

aiconix currently offers B2B solutions that aim to improve productivity by providing customers simple and immediate access to the recent AI innovations.

An Creative Turned Entrepreneur

aiconix’s Co-founder and CEO, Eugen L. Gross, started his career as a camera assistant in Vienna and quickly became a cameraman for news when he moved to Berlin. In the 90s Eugen worked as an SNG operator and technical lead of an OB-van. But he was drawn back to the camera, shooting mainly live music and entertainment productions for TV. In the 2000s he became a partner of a TV production company in Cologne and produced a beautiful but very unsuccessful long-term documentary in Northern Germany where Eugen was a shareholder. In early 2010 he also worked as a producer and director before pursuing a master’s degree in media management and set the course for aiconix in 2016 with his master’s thesis.

Path Breaking Offerings

In an automated process, aiconix can enrich audio-visual content with metadata. Also with the auto-cataloging process, the search in the media archive according to certain parameters is very easy. With AI features such as face recognition, object localizer, or person tracking, one can search and process the AV content in many ways.

The organization also offers several speech-to-text solutions such as the automated transcription and subtitling of any audio or video file and live-video streams, which is important for companies who want to reach those who are deaf or hearing impaired and also help non-native speakers to better understand the content.

Additionally, as a part of the STADIEM acceleration program aiconix has set itself the goal of improving the automated recognition of Austrian dialects in audio-visual media. For this purpose, aiconix is training a language model that specializes in the recognition of Austrian dialects. The focus of the project is on the recognition of “Wiener-Standard-Deutsch” (Viennese Standard German), followed by other Austrian dialects, and the recognition of other dialects within Europe. This project has indirectly received funding from the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 Framework Programme through the STADIEM project (Grant Agreement 957321).

aiconix’s customers are mainly media companies and digital asset management or content management software companies, but in general, all owners of the high volume of media content are potential customers such as educational institutions, Government, Healthcare providers, or Insurance companies.

A Life Changing Technology

As we all know AI is a game-changer in all industries. Nowadays the amount of generated data outpaces our ability to absorb, interpret, and make complex decisions based on that data. Artificial intelligence forms the basis for all machine learning and aiconix believes, it is the future of all complex decision-making.

AI technology offers several critical benefits that make it an excellent tool for any modern organization. Just a few examples: AI can automate a repetitive task that was previously done manually, it can make products and services smarter and more effective.

Additionally, this technology can also analyze data at a much faster rate than humans, allowing it to find patterns much more quickly, and to uncover patterns humans would simply miss. Simply put, Artificial Intelligence allows organizations to make better decisions, improving business processes by increasing the speed and the accuracy of decision-making processes.

Protecting Data and Privacy

When it comes to upcoming trends of AI, data privacy and ethics are the top focus. According to the organization, Multimodal models and federated learning are the next big things and will again speed up the possibilities it has. Multimodal AI is the ultimate convergence of computer vision and conversational AI models to deliver powerful scenarios closer to human perception. It takes AI inference to the next level, combining visual and speech modalities.

In machine learning, usually data that is aggregated from several devices and is brought together to a centralized server. Machine Learning algorithms, then grab this data and train and finally predicts results for new data generated. But this could become a “privacy nightmare”. The solution could be federated learning, which is a method of machine learning that enables individual devices to learn together using a common model. It enables the individual training of models on different, isolated data sets. Only these trained models, which no longer contain personal data, are then shared with each other. The devices send their respective models to a central server, which creates a single, combined model from them.

Preparing for a Bright Future

As an AI company, aiconix want to play a pivotal role in its market and strive for long-term customer relationships. The organization is agile and able to cope with the changes brought and driven by external factors. But most importantly, aiconix is always trying to drive change instead of responding to change. The organization’s goal is to bring (AI) solutions to the market and create a demand for it by relating its utility to the daily work of its customers. Therefore, the best way to become future-ready is to create the future.