Lily AI Announces $12.5M Series A

MaintainPR client Lily AI is a female led (and coded) platform focused on using deep learning to help brands better convert customers through emotionally tailored recommendations.

The experienced team, including SXSW Award winner Purva Gupta and former Box/Yahoo tech lead Sowmiya Chocka Narayanan, have recently announced a $12.5 million Series A led by Canaan Partners. Prior investors NEA, Unshackled and Fernbrook Capital also took part in the funding event.

Read more on TechCrunch for how a personal shopping pain point from Purva led to leading AI and Machine Learning solving multiple issues for big brands and retailers.

“Lily AI raises a $12.5M Series A led by Canaan to accelerate its e-commerce recommendation tech” — TechCrunch

GumGum's Incredible Growth Spotlighted in Forbes

GumGum's computer vision platform for in-image advertising is expanding beyond media and ad verticals. By helping sports sponsors evaluate ROI across untapped opportunities in social media, this MaintainPR client has seen a record year, surpassing $100M in revenue.

Read more in Forbes.

How GumGum Is Using Image Recognition Technology To Change Online Advertising, Sports Sponsorships And More -- Forbes

It's a Wrap! LDV Vision Summit 2017 Summary and Press

The 4th annual LDV Vision Summit concluded last week in NYC.

Congrats to the winners of the best startup (Fantasmo.io's Jameson Detweiler, Co-Founder & CEO) and Entrepreneurial Computer Vision Challenge's winner Timnit Gebru, Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, PhD Candidate!

This year had many resounding takeaways about myth versus reality of general AI, where exactly we are autonomous driving (thanks to detailed presentations from Lyft, AutoX and Uber) and especially in health tech, a new area where we had expert talks on how AI and machine vision are accelerating treatment of disease ; liberating the MRI. 

The addition of moderation from Fortune's Erin Griffith was great and she joined already seasoned pros like Mike Murphy (Quartz) and Joshua Brustein (Bloomberg) to help make sure panelists and speakers stayed on their toes and delivered value for the audience.

Here is a recap of the press. We'll see you next year!

5 ways computer vision could impact how we do AI -- VentureBeat

LDV Vision Summit in Fortune Term Sheet -- Fortune

Power to the pupils: The Internet of Eyes is fueling a race to dominate next generation cameras -- Venturebeat

Smartglasses to Replace Phones? -- Althea Chang, Tom's Guide

The war over artificial intelligence will be won with visual data -- Evan Nisselson, TechCrunch

LDV Capital on Amazon's 'Look' and the 'Internet of Eyes'

MaintainPR client and LDV Capital Founder Evan Nisselson wrote about the "Internet of Eyes" for Venturebeat about a year ago.

Evan has over 20 years of experience as a serial entrepreneur and digital media expert.  His international expertise ranges from building four visual technology businesses to assisting technology startups in raising capital, business development and more.

This year, Amazon announced the Look just a month out from the annual LDV Vision Summit. Built for the fashion conscience and sporting a fresh set of connected eyes, this device has all sorts of ramifications for the future of connected devices and visual machine learning.

Former Wired writer Jessi Hempel sourced Evan for some great insights around the launch of Look in this Backchannel piece:

The Echo Look is Amazon’s Trojan Horse -- Backchannel

It's a Wrap! LDV Vision Summit 2016 and the Internet of Eyes

This year's LDV Vision Summit, produced annually in New York by serial investor and photo fanatic Evan Nisselson, covered everything from 3D imaging and VR to deep learning and Facebook Live. We all came away convinced that The Internet of Eyes is coming and it's an important area that all of us — creatives, engineers, marketers, and investors — should be keeping an "eye" (pun intended) on. 

MaintainPR is agency of record for LDV Vision Summit and has managed media relations since the inaugural event in 2013.

With speakers like Bijan Sabet (Spark Capital); Patricia Hadden (NBCUniversal Media, SVP of Marketing), Jason Rosenthal, (Lytro, CEO), Yuanzhen Lim (VSCO Director of Engineering, Sold Moving Sciences); Nicolas Steegmann (GoPro Software Engineering Sr. Director. Sold Stupefix), Larry Zitnick, (Facebook AI Research Lead) we have a blast each time and learn a ton.

Check out some of the selected media coverage in The Next Web, TechCrunch and more below.

"Why image recognition is about to transform business" -- TechCrunch

"It’s coming! The Internet of Eyes will allow objects to See" -- The Next Web

"Facebook Bringing 360 Photos to News Feed, Samsung Gear VR" -- Adweek

"Facebook Is Trying to Figure Out How to Automatically Detect Mirror Selfies" -- VICE Motherboard

"Innovation & Trends in Video and Digital Imaging at the LDV Vision Summit 2016" -- VizWorld

"AI struggles with mirror selfies as Facebook scientists try to instill new skills" -- RT

"Mediachain enivisions a blockchain-based tool for identifying artists’ work across the internet" -- TechCrunch

"Could Blockchains Solve The Web's Image Attribution Problem?" -- Fast Co.

"You need to be thinking about computer vision" -- Venturebeat