Today, Madrona is pleased to announce the second annual Intelligent Applications Summit on October 10th and October 11th at the Seattle Four Seasons!
The response to last year’s Summit — where we brought together over 250 leaders across the AI/ML community, including founders, researchers, VCs, and industry innovators — was overwhelmingly positive from all corners. This year, we are excited to welcome an incredible roster of speakers to the stage, including Meta VP & Chief AI Scientist Yann LeCun, Insitro CEO Daphne Koller, Langchain CEO Harrison Chase, Typeface CEO Abhay Parasnis, CVP of Microsoft’s Office Product Group Sumit Chauhan, and Goldman CIO Marco Argenti. The Summit comes shortly after we announce the 2023 Intelligent Application 40 winners, so we will also feature some of the most exciting AI and generative AI startup leaders – more on that to come! This year, we are delighted to host the IA Summit in partnership with Amazon, Microsoft, McKinsey, NYSE, and Pitchbook.
It is hard to believe how AI, particularly generative AI, has become ubiquitous since the inaugural Intelligent Applications Summit in the Fall of 2022. Despite the relative slowdown in the VC markets, our partners at Pitchbook sited that over $1.7B of capital was invested into generative AI startups in Q1 2023. And it’s predicted that number will likely increase by 5x in Q2. Madrona has been investing in AI for over a decade, helping fund over 30 early-stage AI-powered companies in just the last five years, including Typeface, Fixie, Runway, and Unstructured, announced recently.
In the last several months, the pace of innovation dramatically increased. At the infrastructure and model layer, we have seen the launch of new foundation models like GPT-4, PalM2, Dolly 2.0, and more. We predicted last year that middleware would emerge as a major category of generative AI, and we have seen new application frameworks and developer communities emerge around companies and opensource projects like Langchain, Fixie, LlamaIndex, and established companies like Semantic Kernal from Microsoft. At the application layer, a host of generative-native companies are challenging incumbents trying to embed generative features into their products.
At the inaugural Summit last year, we had the unique opportunity to hear predictions, insights, and what was coming down the pike from founders like Cris Valenzuela of Runway ML, industry leaders like Charles Lamanna of Microsoft and Matt Garman of AWS, and academic leaders like Oren Etzioni from the AI2 Incubator and Carlos Guestrin from Stanford. We expect the IA Summit 2023 to be no different. We recognize that the worlds of intelligent and generative applications and their enabling technologies are emerging as the most important source of disruptive innovation for private companies, the venture ecosystem, early-adopter customers, and technology partners. With that in mind, this year’s speakers and panels will dive into topics ranging from open-source vs. closed-source models to generative-native vs. generative-enhanced applications to the use of FMs across sectors like drug research, consumer applications, and productivity tools.
The event will again be invite-only for a curated group of leaders in the field. If you are a founder or innovator in the intelligent and generative Apps space and are interested in attending, request an invite.
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