I’m always humbled, but also highly excited and proud to have been a part of the growth of a successful innovator as they go from start up to SME to scale up and acquisition.
Of course, all credit goes to the scientists, engineers and business managers at these companies. As a business owner myself I appreciate that, but I do believe we can play a small but significant role in this journey.
Since launching AutoSens in 2016 there have been a number of examples of businesses who were just bursting onto the scene at that time and who have now gone on to greater things. Chronocam (now Prophesee) is one, I remember meeting Luca Verre onsite in Brussels and while our businesses are very different beasts, we shared the same excitement and enthusiasm about where we wanted to be heading.
Innoviz, XenomatiX, Outsight, AEye and are a few others who were involved in AutoSens in the early stages and I know for sure have made useful connections via our community. While they were going for some years prior to AutoSens, Codeplay have been active at every event we’ve run since launch and it was amazing to see the news of their acquisition last month by Intel, true recognition of all the hard work put in by Andrew, Charles and the team.
And this month, it put a huge smile on my face to see this news about the expansion of Owl AI. It seems like yesterday, but back in 2020 I spotted some interesting news about their novel approach to imaging and invited Founder Chuck Gershman to deliver a presentation at our online edition of AutoSens Detroit. I remember he was surprised there was no cost to participate – “No, we invite speakers purely based on technical merit”, I replied, “the deal is that you don’t just deliver marketing slides, we want to hear the technical details.”.
Chuck was all in (I believe it was the first or one of the first times he’d shared Owl’s work in such a forum). The session had lots of interest from our audience, I remember the Q&A was a long session and we didn’t have time to go through all the questions (I did follow up and connect Chuck with participants afterwards), and it was great to see the interest in this new innovative company.
Since then it’s been fascinating to see Owl AI grow in stature. I see more and more mentions in trade press, and their participation with AutoSens had grown too, being one of our most talked-about exhibitors at the latest Detroit event in May.
Why am I sharing this?
From our side, we see our role as providing a platform, and helping to build connections for early-stage companies. As a respected conference series, whether it’s AutoSens or InCabin, we can provide innovators access to an expert audience with a thirst for innovative solutions to their current and future challenges. These may be broad sweeping supply chain challenges, or very a very focused technical bottleneck, but if you are working on a solution that can benefit ADAS and AV development, you should get in touch and find out how we can help give you a voice, and accelerate the growth of your business.
