Twelve Startups Pitch AI Tools to In-Q-Tel, Intelligence Community

In-Q-Tel, the intelligence community’s venture capital arm, has named Focal Systems as the winner of a competition that featured artificial intelligence tools from 12 startup companies.

Focal Systems developed and presented a retail automation technology to IC representatives, investors and corporate executives during the “AI Computing at the Edge” pitch event, IQT said Thursday.

The winning tool uses deep learning algorithms designed to identify and monitor up to 200,000 types of retail product.

“There is a large, disruptive wave of startups leveraging AI-trained models in the cloud to affect actions, insights and novel computing at the edge of the internet,” said George Hoyem, a managing director at IQT.

Executives from Boeing, Cisco, IBM and Lockheed Martin helped evaluate platforms from the 12 finalists that were selected out of more than 70 nominations.

In-Q-Tel collaborated with Silicon Valley Bank to facilitate the event.