Upper Austrian AI Venture Hub - when the Upper Austrian AI community meets

Karin Gabrielfrom the AEC's Future Thinking School opened the Upper Austrian AI Venture Hub event in front of a large audience. Chat GPT is on everyone's lips and is not only shaking up the software industry - from students to the creative industries, every branch of industry is affected. But Chat GPT is just one of many AI applications. At the Upper Austrian AI Venture Hub, artificial intelligence was examined from three different perspectives: from the point of view of research, investors and companies - especially start-ups.

AI from a research perspective

Anna-Christina Glock, researcher at the Software Competence Center Hagenberg, explained what AI is, how it can be trained and, in particular, which areas of application already exist (e.g. perspective maintenance in industry or in the healthcare sector, where AI makes better cancer diagnoses) and will exist in the future. When asked what the future will look like, Anna-Christian Glock is convinced that self-driving cars and many other exciting areas of application will become commonplace for us.

AI from the investors' perspective

In the interview, Sok-Kheng Taing, co-founder of Dynatrace and partner of venture capitalist 3VC, spoke about her strategy, the current AI hype and what a perfect startup or investment case would look like for 3VC. She also gave the start-ups a few tips along the way. Quality before quantity and the focus on people - that's what 3VC stands for. When it comes to investments, it is particularly important that start-ups have a deep technological background in order to achieve a corresponding technological edge. Sok-Kheng Taing is convinced that the AI hype is one of the most important technologies of our time. 3VC promotes new products and believes in the talent in Europe.

Tips for start-ups:

• COSTS: It always costs more money than you think (production development, marketing, sales)
• TEAM: If the team gets bigger or even doubles in size, you also have to change the organization and of course hand over responsibilities. You have to be replaceable.
• GROWTH: You can only grow if you promote talent. Employees are absolutely vital and contribute to the company's success.

AI pitches from startups

In 5-minute pitches, 3 selected Upper Austrian AI start-ups gave their best to score points in front of the investors present and to present their wishes to the community.

• Birth AI with Markus Manz is working on improving the quality assessment of blastocysts (early-stage embryos) with the help of AI, thereby increasing the chances of getting pregnant.
• Nico Teringl from Danube Dynamics presented AI at the Edge. He uses embedded artificial intelligence to help increase safety and productivity in industrial applications. Danube Dynamics optimizes existing algorithms and models for the hardware platform used by the customer so that the lowest possible execution time or latency and the best possible results are achieved at the same time.
• Andreas Diensthuberpresented Daphos, an innovative cloud platform. Health Workforce Management is a control tool for personnel, resource and process management for all types of healthcare facilities.

AI - Due Diligence

Franziksos Kyriakopoulos from 7Lytix explained how important the topic of due diligence is in all aspects of artificial intelligence. The mere fact that we already work with Chat GPT4 on a broad basis and have images produced by an AI means that we need due diligence to assess the underlying models. There will also be the European AI Act, which will require testing and certification of certain AI applications. Explicit AI due diligence should also enable investors to better assess the degree of innovation and the security of imitation of products and solutions.

Who are the supporters of the Upper Austrian AI Venture Hubs?

Verena Stanzl from Women in AI Upper Austria, Raphael Friedl from tech2b, AI Upper Austria represented by Bernhard Niedermayer from Cloudlflight, Franziskos Kyriakopoulos from 7Lytix, Markus Manz from SCCH. Four more companies and organizations from the audience spontaneously offered their support for the AI community: Robert Voitleitner from Microsoft, Sok-Kheng Taing from 3VC, Thomas Riesz from Haslinger Nagele and Doris Kaiserreiner from LIT AI Lab.

The common goal of all those involved is to strengthen Upper Austria as an economic region in the important future technology of artificial intelligence and to create an attractive effect.

"Talking makes the heart grow fonder" - the kick-off for the Upper Austrian AI Venture Hub was a complete success for the start-ups, investors, students and the entire AI community. We are looking forward to the next Upper Austrian AI Venture Hub meeting, which will take place in the fall.

Photo credit: tech2b