The Innovator's Radar newsletter enables you to stay on top of the latest business innovations. Enjoy this week's edition.
Jennifer L. Schenker
Innovator Founder and Editor-in-Chief |
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Some 140 private equity and venture capital investors from across Europe met in Paris February 8 to discover the Continent’s deep tech talent and discuss how to better support and fund Europe's tech champions. Three scale-ups were awarded prizes at Tech Tour Growth50 Europe 2024: France’s SiPearl which is developing a high-performance, low-power microprocessor that will be at the heart of European supercomputers, contributing to Europe’s technological sovereignty; DNA Script, a French life sciences technology company developing a new, faster, powerful, and versatile way to design and manufacture nucleic acids with the aim of making biology programmable; and UK-based Carbon Clean, which specializes in industrial carbon capture systems. The Innovator's Editor-in-Chief moderated a session entitled "Growing and Funding Europe's Tech Champions" (pictured here) with Michiel Scheffer, President of the Board of the European Commission's European Innovator Council (EIC), Philippe Huberdeau, Secretary General Scale Up Europe at the Presidency of the French Republic, Lars Froelund, MIT, EIC Fund Board Member and a Special Advisor for Digital & Technological Sovereignty to European Executive Vice-President Margrethe Vestager, and Terera Cunha, Operational Leader at the EIC Scaling Club, a new EIC-funded curated community that brings together 100 European deep tech scale-ups with corporates and investors. The Paris event was a kind of coming-out party for the EIC Scaling Club, which has already attracted a core group of corporates, including Shell, Bosch, Total, semiconductor manufacturer ST and German and French car manufacturers, as members. “The value for the corporates is to follow growth companies in ten different market segments,” says William Stevens, CEO of The Tech Tour and Leader of the EIC Scaling Club. “Each corporate typically joins three to five groups. Other advantages include forming relations with fellow Club members and key institutions and policymakers at European and EU member state levels. “
Read on to learn more about this story and the week's most important technology news impacting business. |
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| What do chatbots emulating the role of a rabbi or medical school professor have to do with business? A lot, it turns out. Projects involving both are testing a technology call Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), a technique for enhancing the accuracy and reliability of generative AI models by fetching facts from qualified sources. The approach could democratize education and, if pundits are right, could also enable the dependable scaling of generative AI, helping companies reap the full business benefits. RAG is able to digest complex queries and give models sources they can cite, like footnotes in a research paper, so users can check their legitimacy. It can also reduce the possibility a model will hallucinate. Once companies get familiar with RAG, they can combine a variety of off-the-shelf or custom large language models (LLMs) with internal or external knowledge bases to create a wide range of assistants that help their employees and customers, says a blog posting by Nvidia, which has developed an enterprise offering that includes a sample chatbot and the elements users need to create their own applications with RAG. The integration of RAG technology offers significant business benefits, “particularly when coupled with existing search modules and enterprise databases,” says Bernhard Pflugfelder, head of the Innovation Lab at Germany’s appliedAI Initiative, a venture involving over 50 partners from science and industry, the public sector, and selected start-ups working on the development of trustworthy AI. The appliedAI Initative’s partners are already actively advancing RAG technology in prototypes and minimal viable products, says Pflugfelder. “Waiting is not advisable for businesses; they should proactively embrace this transformative technology and learn about best practices and potential use cases in their organizations.” |
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Who: Matt McKnight is General Manager, Biosecurity at Ginkgo Bioworks, a U.S. company building a platform to enable industry to program cells as easily as programing computers. The company's platform is powering biotechnology applications across diverse markets, from food and agriculture to industrial chemicals and pharmaceuticals
Topic: Why industry needs to think about biosecurity
Quote: "The threat envelope from biology is changing dramatically, making it a matter of national security. Biorisk is accelerating across the board (natural, accidental, and intentional) and it's intersecting with climate change, geopolitical instability, disinformation, and other major issues of our time. Biothreats are also an economic problem, they can affect food systems and critical infrastructure, they can destabilize society and political systems. For industry specifically, they can have massive implications for global supply chains, operations, and work forces. Industry should really think about these threats as equally critical to mitigate as cyber. You wouldn't dream of a modern enterprise without cybersecurity tools."
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| Gecko Robotics provides full-stack robotic inspection and software modeling technology to give power plants, oil and gas, manufacturing, defense, and other sectors insights into the health of their physical assets. The information can be used to reduce carbon emissions, increase manufacturing efficiency, ensure security compliance, reduce power outages, and even determine the availability of military ships. Its platform keeps track of more than 60,000 physical assets around the globe. “Think of it as a decision maker tool for the built world,” says Gecko Robotics’ CEO and Co-Founder Jake Loosararian. Some 60% of the energy infrastructure is past useful life or nearing it, he says. The goal is to make it last longer and avoid blackouts and brownouts. At the same time companies are trying to reduce carbon emissions and move to Net Zero. “‘Our contention is you can solve for all of these things if you can measure data in a differentiated way,” he says. “This requires collecting information on the health of all the infrastructure that is running. decoding the physical world, building software on top and then not just using machine learning on the signals but on the data layer to decode what the raw signals are telling us and put it into context. Once you do that you can accurately map the physical health of assets to determine their availability and reliability.”- |
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Amount of money a finance worker at a multinational firm was tricked into transferring to fraudsters using deepfake technology, according to Hong Kong police.The elaborate scam saw the worker duped into attending a video call with what he thought were several other members of staff and the company's chief financial officer, Hong Kong police said at a briefing.“(In the) multi-person video conference, it turns out that everyone [he saw] was fake,” senior superintendent Baron Chan Shun-ching told the city’s public broadcaster RTHK. The case is one of several recent episodes in which fraudsters are believed to have used deepfake technology to modify publicly available video and other footage to scam people.
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