Bonsai, an artificial intelligence company based in Berkeley, California, has just announced a new investment of $ 7.6 million, co-led by Microsoft Ventures and New Enterprise Associates (NEA).
On the surface, this seems quite normal: Microsoft launched a new fund in December 2016 to invest in AI companies, going hand in hand with the corporate approach of titan technology in the incorporation of artificial intelligence in all its products and services. In fact, just today, Microsoft also announced an investment in Agolo, another AI start. In addition, Mark Hammond, CEO of Bonsai, is former Microsoft.
What is remarkable is that Bonsai technology, aimed at helping companies in manufacturing, retailing, logistics and other similar physical markets incorporate artificial intelligence, is based on TensorFlow - a very popular tool created in Google To help build so-called machine learning systems, and an alternative to Microsoft's own CNTK.
To Hammond's mind, it should not be a big surprise. Under CEO Satya Nadella, Microsoft has been dedicated to supporting any technology that developers want to use; Hammond says Bonsai's bet on TensorFlow "is not a barrier to them." In fact, Hammond says, Bonsai and Microsoft share a vision of making AI more accessible to programmers.
"The barrier to them is the goal," he says. "Microsoft's vision and messaging match our surprisingly well."
Now, along with the new capital, Bonsai is announcing an early access program for developers to test their technology so they can evaluate for themselves the extent to which the company is their target.
The great winter of AI
Hammond began his career seriously at Microsoft, working on Windows 95 and the first version of Internet Explorer. It was there that his interest in AI was first provoked.
But there were not many opportunities to pursue that interest - it was fair during the "AI winter," a period when AI hype had outpaced results, so a failed technology industry stopped funding research in the field.
"It was a terrible time to do anything at AI, since it was the center of the AI winter," he says.
After Microsoft, it rebounded across the country for a while, taking jobs at Yale and a handful of startups and research labs. At one point, he returned to Microsoft for a two-year evangelistic development.
It was in 2014, while working as a researcher, that he realized that the winter AI was coming to an end. Enthusiasm for AI was coming back, and so was money. He took the opportunity, quit his job, and started Bonsai along with Keen Browne, a friend of his days at Microsoft.
It turned out to be a prescient remark, as artificial intelligence is definitely having its moment in the sun once again, with Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Amazon, and many more big companies making big bets on technology as a key to their business models . To date, Bonsai has raised $ 13.6 million.
"It was a kind of gamble that was going down the pipeline," says Hammond. "It was part engineering serendipity, and part luck."
Learning
Hammond acknowledges that companies like Amazon, Google and Microsoft are doing a good job making artificial intelligence technologies available to developers. But he says his approaches are rather limited, whether he has to have the resources of a Fortune 500 company to customize the code, or he has to use his pre-packaged but rigid and inflexible services around such things as image recognition .
"If you're Google, Facebook, Amazon, that's fine, you're fine," says Hammond. But it's less than ideal if you're a manufacturing company, retailer or anything else that involves real-world logistics, where you may not have the same engineering resources, and those pre-packaged services do not meet your needs.
In that scenario, a factory already has software they are using to feed that robot and its actions, but they may want to use AI to optimize their habits for greater efficiency. Existing AI tools do not facilitate the bridge with such software, but it is a kind of Bonsai specialty. Programmers can add AI without having to be a PhD genius.
"We focus on a little-attended part of the spectrum," Hammond says.
