PreSeries’ Algorithm Chooses Pixoneye as the Startup Most Likely to Succeed

PreSeries, the joint venture between Telefónica Open Future_ and BigML, staged the fourth edition of the Artificial Intelligence Startup Battle yesterday (Tuesday, February 28). The event took place at the main stage of the 4 Years From Now (4YFN) event, the startup focused platform of the Mobile World Congress that enables investors and corporations to connect with successful entrepreneurs to launch new ventures together. More than 500 attendees witnessed this unique battle, where no humans were involved in assessing the contestants. Instead, the Machine Learning algorithm of PreSeries chose the winner.

This fourth edition followed the footsteps of the previous AI Startup Battles, the first one celebrated in Valencia last March 15, 2016, the second one in Boston on October 12, 2016, and the third one in Sao Paulo on December 9, 2016, where PreSeries’ algorithm asked a number of dynamically selected questions to each contender in order to provide a score between 0 and 100. The startup with the highest score won the contest as the system deemed it to be the one with most likelihood of future success. The predictions are based on historical data from more than 350.000 companies from around the world.

Pixoneye, the winner of the Artificial Intelligence Startup Battle at 4 Years From Now conference. Ana Segurado, the Global Manager of Telefónica Open Future_ gives away the award (left) to Pixoneye’s Erin Bronstein (right).

With a score of 96.63, the winner was announced as Pixoneye. Pixoneye is based in London and Tel Aviv; and offers the ability to analyze the untapped power of mobile users’ photo galleries on behalf of their clients. The second place finisher was Action.ai with a score of 94.00, an English company that develops chatbots that revolutionises customer interactions for businesses. The third position, with 67.82 points, was for people.io of London. people.io gives people ownership of their data to enable the next phase in the evolution of human connectivity. Finally, the fourth placed contestant (with a score of 61.23) was Descifra of Mexico, which helps businesses understand the characteristics of the markets around them through easy to understand charts, tables, and maps.

As in previous battles, the audience enthusiastically warmed up to the idea of an AI system judging the contestants after the pitch sessions and was excited to witness Pixoneye being crowned the latest AI Startup Battle winner.