Startup radar: European VCs on AI startups to watch

Artificial intelligence is predicted to be a key theme for venture capital this year as investors race to fund the next OpenAI.

Last year, $78 billion was invested across 6,727 global AI and machine learning deals, according to PitchBook's 2023 Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Overview. While the downturn in venture dealmaking has impacted the sector, investors expect appetite to remain robust for startups developing breakthrough technology.

"Once every decade or so, we see a platform shift that upends everything—just as mobile, social and cloud did—and this is one of those moments," Index Ventures partner Carlos Gonzalez-Cadenas said. "AI will transform every industry and impact every company."

We asked six European VCs active in AI to share two startups—one in their portfolio, one not—that they think are worth highlighting.

Lina Chong
Partner, Target Global (Berlin) Nimble (Israel) "With the proliferation of data and the commoditization of powerful AI, a company's ability to access and utilize large amounts of data becomes one of the biggest challenges and opportunities.

"Nimble, one of our fastest-growing portfolio companies, allows organizations to seamlessly access, analyze and transform the public internet into actionable insights through data applications with direct access to real-time, structured web data. This drives innovative, data-driven opportunities across departments and data enrichment applications." Replicate (US) "Companies that help enable algorithm deployments with ease and at scale, like Replicate or Hugging Face, seem like a game changer within the context of accessibility to AI. Although Microsoft Azure and others have a similar proposition, Replicate in particular seems to be growing at an incredible rate and with strong support from its developer community."

Carlos Gonzalez-Cadenas
Partner, Index Ventures (London) Causaly (UK) "Causaly uses AI to discover hidden connections and make new predictions in biomedical research. It reads all the biomedical literature ever published, analyzing and connecting over 35 million scientific documents and clinical trial databases. The potential impact is profound, helping to accelerate medical research, drug discovery and delivery of scientific breakthroughs." Synthesia (UK) "Synthesia is an AI video creation platform that makes it much easier and faster to create videos without the usual complexity and costs."

Florian Schweitzer
Partner, B2venture (Lausanne, Switzerland) DeepL (Germany) "DeepL is the global technology leader for machine translation. The unmatched quality of its translations has allowed the company to grow organically in recent years. Millions of users worldwide work with the service on a regular basis. At the beginning of the year, DeepL Write was added as a second product that enables people to write better texts in their mother tongue.

"In recent months, the awareness of additional automation opportunities through AI has skyrocketed. DeepL's technology, quality leadership, additional languages and deep integration into work tools like Outlook, Word or Chrome will further fuel the company's growth." ElevenLabs (US) "ElevenLabs is an AI-powered text-to-speech platform that can create natural-sounding voice-overs for videos or audiobooks. In 2001, B2venture brought together the founding team of SVOX, a text-to-speech startup that was at the forefront of its time, had been doing very well and eventually got sold. ElevenLabs is now using artificial intelligence to not only replicate human voices with intonation, but also add emotion.

"We like this early-stage company and wish ElevenLabs [will] continue to do well in 2023. It very likely could do so as it is used to create audio tracks in multiple languages for video content created by generative AI companies."

Anders Hammarbäck
Partner, Antler (Stockholm) Hypertype (Sweden) "Hypertype has a two-year advantage in powering their email-automation service with data and AI algorithms. Founders Teenie and Beatrice utilize the strengths of OpenAI's intelligence with their own foundation models, interconnecting all business data to make them instantly available at one single point. Eventually, people can read, understand and write without using their brains. The waitlist is impressive!" Neko Health (Sweden) "Neko Health leverages the latest hardware, including multiple cameras, sensor technology, blood sampling, and lasers to provide a full-body diagnostic scan, with artificial intelligence powering the data models to make the diagnostics stronger over time as more data is gathered."

Perman Jorayev
VC investor, Verve Ventures (Cambridge, UK) Omniscope AI (Spain) "Omniscope AI has developed a platform to perform high-precision immune profiling. It is based on immunosequencing of 1 million distinct T-cell receptor sequences from blood with sensitivities that can be translated into high-value, differentiated diagnostics and therapeutic products. This is all enabled by their AI platform and disease-specific data libraries.

"As validated by initial partnerships, the high sensitivity and proprietary disease library allow Omniscope to develop diagnostics and therapeutics at different stages of disease progression. Moving forward, the company will be rolling out different products across vaccine development, immunotherapy and patient monitoring." RetinAI (Switzerland) "RetinAI is a software company that specializes in developing solutions to help healthcare professionals make better decisions, faster. By leveraging the power of artificial intelligence and process optimization, they provide insights to support decision-making processes, enabling new drugs to be brought to market more quickly and supercharging clinical trials. The technology is designed to help other stakeholders, like hospitals and clinics, optimize patient management and integrates into existing software solutions. RetinAI is at the forefront of digital precision medicine, redefining the standard of care with proprietary and patient-specific ML models.

"Although they started in ophthalmology, they now use the eye as a window to apply the technology to other therapeutic areas like neurodegenerative disorders and cardiovascular conditions."

Manjari Chandran-Ramesh
Partner, Amadeus Capital Partners (London) Tenzo (UK) "Tenzo is an AI-powered restaurant performance ops platform. It can deliver actionable insights to the restaurant industry using data from a range of pipelines—including sales, labor, inventory, weather, social media and more. Data-driven forecasting, using a combination of deep learning and other techniques, allows Tenzo to help managers cut down food waste and optimize how they deploy labor. Meaningful recommendations from Tenzo moves restaurants from surviving to thriving—increasingly important in a high inflation, high labor cost world." Navenio (UK) "Navenio, a spin-out of Oxford University, provides location-based services for indoor environments including hospitals. Its beacon-free indoor tracking smartphone sensors create a highly scalable indoor map able to provide operations teams with actionable insights immediately. This way, the product delivers a two to three times improvement in the number of tasks completed by hospital staff, which in turn improves patient experience, staff retention and the bottom line, while also minimizing the risk for cross-contamination between wards."

Featured image by Sergey Tarasov/Shutterstock

This article originally appeared on PitchBook News