SEATTLE, September 16, 2021 – Global manufacturing leader CNH Industrial has joined the 5G Open Innovation Lab (“5G OI Lab”) as the first industry partner to rapidly accelerate applied innovation in agriculture and manufacturing, the Lab announced today. The Lab also today welcomed 12 new startups building breakthrough innovations, from deep learning technology for automotive vision to new cybersecurity platforms, artificial intelligence voice technology infrastructure, wildfire detection systems and more.
CNH joins founding and corporate partners Accenture, Amdocs, Avanade, Dell Technologies, Ericsson, F5, Intel, Microsoft, Spirent, T-Mobile and VMware. The 5G OI Lab's partner centric approach to applied innovation brings together leading startup innovators, global technology platforms, and industry leaders to collaborate on the rapid development and deployment of next-generation technology and business solutions.
CNH Industrial (NYSE: CNHI /MI: CNHI) is a global leader in the capital goods sector with established industrial experience, a wide range of products and a worldwide presence. Each of the individual brands belonging to the Company is a major international force in its specific industrial sector: Case IH, New Holland Agriculture and Steyr for tractors and agricultural machinery; Case and New Holland Construction for earth moving equipment; Iveco for commercial vehicles; Iveco Bus and Heuliez Bus for buses and coaches; Iveco Astra for quarry and construction vehicles; Magirus for firefighting vehicles; Iveco Defence Vehicles for defense and civil protection; and FPT Industrial for engines and transmissions.
"We are incredibly excited to join the 5G Open Innovation Lab as their first industry partner for precision agriculture. This unique platform enables us to collaborate with innovative startups and engage with bright minds working on transformative 5G technologies in the agricultural space," said Scott Wine, Chief Executive Officer, CNH Industrial. "This partnership underscores our commitment to aggressively enhance our precision farming portfolio through the development of new connected digital technologies that allow our customers to unlock their farms' true potential."
Said Jim Brisimitzis, Founder & General Partner, 5G OI Lab, "We have always seen 5G & edge as critical enablers for leading industrial enterprises. Today's announcement with CNH Industrial accelerates our goal of connecting innovators to enterprises building value on global platforms supported by 5G OI Lab founding and corporate partners."
The Lab also announced the selection of 12 startups for its fourth batch to participate in the global applied innovation ecosystem. During the 12-week program, startups work closely with the partners to accelerate monetization opportunities of 5G, edge computing and other use cases and solutions to fuel the global enterprise move to digital (Industry 4.0). The partners provide business and technology assets, resources, and mentorship.
Participating startups from around the world were selected for the exclusive program through a rigorous screening process that seeks to identify the most compelling use cases for various industries from agriculture to health care. They range from more mature Series C companies looking to capitalize on their early successes and fast-track their growth and market leadership to early-stage startups who have secured Series A and B financing with established revenue streams and product. The new batch members have cumulatively raised $203.9 million in investments to date. Since the 5G OI Lab's first Batch in May 2020, 69 teams have participated in the program raising over a half a billion dollars in pre-program funding with 10 teams raising an additional $107.9 million in venture funding post-program.
The 12 companies selected to participate in the Fall 2021 12-week program are developing solutions encompassing a broad range of technologies including AI, advanced driver assist systems, cybersecurity, IoT, natural language processing and advanced wildfire fighting technology.
5G Open Innovation Lab Batch 4 selectees:
- Brodmann17 (Israel) – Brodmann17 develops AI that is revolutionizing safety in mobility. The company’s computer-vision-centered technology saves 95% of compute power. This huge saving in cost has brought AI for the very first time to new verticals including mass-market passenger vehicles, video telematics and micro mobility.
Brodmann17's AI is based on deep learning neural networks that extract all possible information from a video to make the entire ADAS software smarter. Brodmann17's patented perception software is scalable. It is easy to integrate and deploy as it is hardware agnostic and works on any processor from low-power edge to the cloud.
Brodmann17 is growing fast and has attracted high-profile technology and automotive industry players - it is backed by Silicon Valley, European and Israeli VCs as well as Samsung, Sony, and Xilinx. https://brodmann17.com/
- DarwinAI (Canada) - DarwinAI is the leader in Explainable AI (XAI), a collection of technologies that reveals how and why AI makes the decisions that it does. These valuable insights enable DarwinAi to build superior enterprise AI solutions that have a smaller memory footprint, are more computationally efficient, and perform with extraordinarily high levels of precision.
At present, the company is disrupting the manufacturing sector through their (XAI) technology for numerous Fortune 100 companies. In particular, their proprietary XAI is critical in human-in-the-loop use-cases where an operator must validate automated decisions in an important way. Moreover, their ability to quantify the trustworthiness of AI systems is becoming imperative in view of evolving regulations around AI transparency. https://darwinai.com/
- Juganu (Israel) – Juganu’s mission is to converge the benefits of the digital into the physical world by enabling safe, connected environments. It combines lighting with an AI-edge compute platform to monitor, analyze and secure public spaces. The company’s technology empowers any organization to leverage the value of real-time data insights - both indoors and outdoors.
Deployed across four continents, Juganu provides the fastest and most economical way for cities and businesses to become smarter and greener through the most ubiquitous source – light. https://juganu.com/
- Metrolla (Seattle, WA) - Metrolla is an edge data access and deployment platform for smart sensor ecosystems. Metrolla offers high-volume on-demand streaming from data-intensive sensors like LiDAR and additionally provides a highly accurate GPS server, NTP service, and data modem for other V2X sensors. The Metrolla Management Dashboard, offered via multiple cloud-based services, provides an ecosystem for smart sensor data management and centralized data oversight and processing. The dashboard also features a machine learning marketplace to annotate data on the fly and update machine learning algorithms while sensors are running at the edge.
Metrolla's platform streamlines data access, power processing, communication capabilities, and machine learning deployment for smart sensor ecosystems (LiDAR, video, and V2X) to better serve smart cities, v2x, defense, robotics, drone delivery, and more. https://metrolla.com/
- MixMode (Santa Barbara, CA) - MixMode is a Cybersecurity platform powered by a cloud-native, self-learning AI with next generation anomaly detection and predictive capabilities. MixMode ingests and monitors large data volume environments (e.g. Cloud, Enterprise, 5G) in real time to discover zero-day threats and attacks with no signature, including those from ransomware, supply chain attacks and insider threats on Zero Trust Architecture. MixMode can be used in the cloud, edge or on premise to deliver increased productivity and efficiency for environments with IT, OT, ICS and IoT devices.
MixMode’s platform is powered by its patented self-supervised AI, which includes contextual reasoning to explain why threats are highlighted for investigation. This AI is unique in requiring no rules, no intel feeds, and no historical training data in order to operate, avoiding the bias and blind spots that impact legacy systems. MixMode AI is capable of high-speed consumption of numerous big data feeds for processing in real-time and is the only DARPA-defined Third Wave AI in Cybersecurity. https://mixmode.ai
OasisWorks (Billerica, MA) – OasisWorks provides composable infrastructure deployed in the datacenter, edge or customer sites. Legacy datacenter automation and assurance tools provide limited value as it relates to an infrastructure’s total lifecycle and were never designed to handle the diversity or scale of the ‘edge’. With a common API or through the UI, applications or people can find resources, deploy blueprints and assess value. https://oasisworks.com
- Onclave Networks (McLean, VA) - is a global cybersecurity leader securing new and legacy Operational Technology (OT) and IoT/IIOT devices including those using 5G. Onclave dramatically reduces cyberattack surfaces, breaches, network complexity, and costly overhead created by shared infrastructure – enabling a more efficient and secure way to operate and communicate. Delivering an integrated solution based on Zero Trust and leveraging proven methodologies used by the DoD, Onclave is well-positioned to protect vulnerable endpoints across all sectors, on-prem and in the cloud. Onclave brings real trust to communications by securing networks from edge to core. www.onclavenetworks.com.
- Pano (San Francisco, CA) - Pano offers hardware and software solutions for fire professionals and emergency managers via a connected, intelligent platform to detect wildfire threats, confirm fires and disseminate information to responders, faster than ever.
Pano Rapid Detect empowers detection specialists with enhanced visual equipment and rapid data analysis, supported by AI. Specialists have a single, unified view of ultra-high-definition Pano cameras, geo satellite data, field sensors, legacy cameras, emergency alerts, and other data feeds, and can share everything in real-time with their extended team. This makes it possible to quickly identify, contain, and respond to devastating wildfires, protecting lives, property, and our forests. https://www.pano.ai/
- Polte (Addison, TX) - Polte’s unique, patented Cloud Location over Cellular (C-LoC) technology provides the best quality location for any device connected to 4G/5G cellular anywhere, from 5G Massive and Critical IoT to handsets. Through more accessible, global indoor and outdoor visibility, Polte is enabling an unprecedented area in location intelligence and actionable insights for enterprises.
Simply leveraging cloud computing and existing cellular infrastructure, Polte allows customers to eliminate the expense and complexity of deployment while empowering them with a new standard of security control. Polte 5G positioning unlocks further enhanced indoor accuracy and private networks, while also extending heightened accuracy into the smartphone universe. Polte’s deep domain expertise is key to enabling location with 4G/5G. https://www.polte.com/
- Section (Boulder, CO) – Section's Edge as a Service technologies enable SaaS, PaaS, and application builders to accelerate their path to Edge. By removing the burdens associated with infrastructure provisioning, workload orchestration, scaling, monitoring, and traffic routing, Section helps innovators quickly and easily move their services closer to their end-users so they can cost-effectively deliver faster and more secure digital experiences.
Section is the operating system for Edge. With Kubernetes and GitOps at its core, the Section platform provides DevOps teams with consistency, observability, flexibility, and control to simplify management of distributed multi-cloud and Edge environments. Section’s patent-pending Adaptive Edge Engine (AEE) dynamically shifts distributed workload placement and steers traffic to meet organizational and strategic objectives, including compliance, security, performance, and cost. https://www.section.io/
- Symbl.ai (Seattle, WA) – Symbl.ai is a Conversation Intelligence (CI) platform for businesses to contextually understand natural human conversations across voice, video and text communication channels in real-time, at scale. Its suite of products enables developers to easily build and deploy intelligent speech-to-text functionality, extract contextual insights, generate domain-specific insights and intelligence, and access advanced conversation analytics.
The Symbl.ai CI platform is domain agnostic, requires no upfront training, and all capabilities are accessible through comprehensive APIs. Symbl.ai eliminates the complexity of building and maintaining conversation understanding systems (AI) so developers and businesses can focus on building robust and intelligent experiences within their own products across verticals like sales, marketing, customer experience, webinars, collaboration and more. Product owners can leverage deeper conversation data and insights to enable use cases like agent coaching, compliance, workflow automation, live captioning, search and indexing and more. https://symbl.ai/
- Thrugreen (Falls Church, VA) - ThruGreen makes legacy traffic lights smart by connecting them to traffic data, reducing wait times at red lights and cutting CO2 emissions by reducing idling. Its plug and play solution installs within minutes to existing traffic signal cabinets and is compatible with all major traffic hardware vendors.
ThruGreen enables municipalities to prioritize government vehicles by giving automatic priority to first responders and public transit, adjust timing schedules of signals in real time to automatically reduce congestion and delays, share traffic data between intersections, track and manage live intersection status and issue real time alerts for issues and outages. https://thrugreen.com/
"The 5G Open Innovation Lab is a pioneering and critical member of this ecosystem that fills a vital role in gluing parts together," said Dirck Schou, Founder and CEO of Taqtile, a member of the Lab's inaugural batch in 2020. "Directly as a result of our membership in the first class of the Lab, Taqtile is now engaged with several companies, including Intel, T-Mobile, Amdocs, Dell and Microsoft testing real-world implementations of our solution for industrial workers over 5G networks and topology. Without the lab, it would have been incredibly difficult or impossible for us to access these customers and testbeds. Our involvement with the 5GOI Lab has fundamentally changed our company's trajectory and has opened up opportunities we would otherwise not have been able to access," Schou said.
A unique differentiator of the Lab is that it does not take an equity position in its member companies. Rather, companies collaborate with technology and business experts and advisors through private working sessions, CEO and CTO roundtables with a variety of organizations and industries, networking and social events, and opportunities to meet with the Lab's extensive partner network of venture capital firms.
"We set out to build an applied innovation ecosystem that's easy to work within and one that brings the strongest teams, platforms, and leading enterprises to collaborate on what's next," said Brisimitzis. "Batch #4 is a testament to the differentiation of our program and our focus on results-oriented collaboration across leading industries, startups, and platforms. 5G and edge represents a significant transformational opportunity for enterprises, CSPs, and platforms alike. We are one of the few programs in the world exploring the impact of software driven innovation on future 5G networks and its business models."
Earlier this year the Lab also launched its first application development Field Lab focused on the agricultural industry to include greenfield[KSC1] broadband connectivity for smaller farms. The field lab establishes dedicated access to a 5G-capable, CBRS LTE-based network and edge computing platform to bring together food growers and distributors with partner companies from the 5G Open Innovation Lab. The collaboration is focused on new solutions to improve the resiliency of Snohomish County’s agriculture sector, ensuring the sustainability of our critical food supply and minimizing future food service disruptions for consumers and agribusiness. The co-development platform, funded in part by the federal CARES Act, is the first of many development field platforms planned to support additional industries such as manufacturing, health care and transportation.
The 5G Open Innovation Lab reviews new applicants on a rolling admissions basis. Companies can apply to become part of the Spring 2022 batch of ecosystem member companies at the following link: https://5goilab.proseeder.com/application/start
About the 5G Open Innovation Lab
The 5G Open Innovation Lab ("5GOILab") is a global applied innovation ecosystem making it easy for innovators, global platforms, and enterprises to work together and innovate. We give startups at all stages unparalleled access to open platforms and markets needed to create, test and deploy new use cases and innovations for 5G and 5G-enabled technologies, including artificial intelligence and edge computing. We deliver actionable knowledge and market insight that helps our partners and member companies deliver value to customers and grow their revenue and leadership positions. The Lab is a global catalyst committed to the transformation of enterprises utilizing intelligent software-defined platforms. To learn more about the Lab and its ecosystem of companies, please visit https://www.5GOILab.com/ or follow us on Twitter at @5GOILab.
The 5G Open Innovation Lab ("5GOILab") is a global applied innovation ecosystem for corporations, academia and government institutions working together with early-and later-stage start-ups to fuel the development of new capabilities and market categories that will transform the enterprise. We give startups at all stages unparalleled access to open platforms and markets needed to create, test and deploy new use cases and innovations for 5G and 5G-enabled technologies, including artificial intelligence and edge computing. We deliver actionable knowledge and market insight that helps our partners and member companies deliver value to customers and grow their revenue and leadership positions. Ultimately, the Lab is a global catalyst committed to the transformation of enterprises utilizing intelligent software-defined platforms. To learn more about the Lab and its ecosystem of companies, please visit https://www.5GOILab.com/ or follow us on Twitter at @5GOILab.