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Jul 2, 2019

Meet the 10 Startups Competing In the Qualcomm Ventures Female Founders Summit

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The Qualcomm Ventures Female Founders Summit will gather some of the most innovative female-founded, early-stage startups across AI, IoT, AR/VR, and mobile technology with technology leaders and investor communities. A highlight of the event will be the startup competition where an elite group will present their business plans for a chance to receive an award of $500K (in the form of a convertible note) and join our family of portfolio companies. We can’t wait to hear from these inspirational founders, though we know it’s going to be quite difficult to choose from these inventive startups.

Here’s a sneak peek at our participants:

AON Devices

A fabless semiconductor AI company, AON Devices specializes in ultra-low power AI algorithms and processing engines. The company — founded by Mouna Elkhatib, combines deep learning with advanced DSP and is initially focused on speech and audio recognition for battery-powered applications. The final product is intelligent devices that enable clients to enhance the user experience without compromising system power.

ARwall

Co-founded by Jocelyn Hsu, ARwall is an augmented reality tech company that creates stunning large-scale XR solutions for filmmaking, marketing, and experientials. This includes green screen studio alternatives, on-site experiential marketing, interactive displays, and more. The company’s system uses cutting-edge spatial imaging technologies to turn any screen into an AR-capable device, enabling the creation of immersive, interactive displays that require no headsets or goggles to experience them.

BlinkAI

BlinkAI uses machine learning to enhance sensor performance in low-signal environments, extending the range of what cameras can see and detect in the real world. Co-founders Selina Liying Shen​ and Bo Zhu are specifically interested in mission-critical applications, including autonomous vehicles, robotics, industrial sensing, and beyond.

Blue Canoe Learning

Blue Canoe has one goal: help 1B+ non-native English speakers around the world speak English clearly, improving careers and lives. The team — led by co-founders Sarah Daniels and Tony Andrews — developed an AI mobile app that acts as a virtual ESL teacher. By combining a proven methodology based on brain research, patent-pending speech recognition and machine learning, Blue Canoe offers the most effective way to improve English speaking. Blue Canoe sells B2B to corporations for their employees and has a worldwide reseller program with English language learning companies and programs.

Embodied Labs

Carrie Shaw became a caregiver at 19 when her mom was diagnosed with Early-Onset Alzheimer’s disease. Now, with her co-founders Erin Washington and Thomas Leahy, she has created Embodied Labs to give professional and family care partners immersive training programs that transform the way they care for older adults. After finding success in scaling their aging-focused training platform, the company is expanding to build a comprehensive marketplace for senior care organizations to engage with immersive solutions for wellness, therapy, education, and training.

Lab4U

Lab4U is transforming smartphones into science labs to improve STEM education. Their first products, Lab4Physics and Lab4Chemistry, consist of mobile apps that use the built-in sensors in all smartphones and tablets to turn them into scientific tools, allowing students to perform real-world experiments. For example, a device’s speedometer can be used to study physical phenomenon’s like velocity, distance, and displacement, the microphone can act as a sonometer to study waves, amplitude, and time, and the camera as a colorimeter to calculate the concentration of a chemical solution. They also develop educational content based on the principles of inquiry-based science. The goal for co-founders Komal Dadlani and Álvaro Peralta is to increase student interest and engagement in STEM, especially in underserved areas where schools lack science labs.

Lily AI

Co-founded by Purva Gupta and Sowmiya Chocka Narayanan, Lily AI is an emotionally intelligent AI platform that helps brands & retailers see customers as they see themselves. By understanding each individual customer’s emotional context, Lily AI creates the deepest predictive psychographics aka the ‘why’ behind the buying decision online. Using the enriched customer intelligence along with the most deeply enriched product catalogue data, Lily AI is able to improve merchandising, on-site personalization and marketing across the customer journey.

On Second Thought

On Second Thought offers a solution to a problem everyone has experienced: wishing you could unsend a message. The mobile communications company — co-founded by Maci Peterson Philitas and Stewart Voit — offers patented delay/recall technology that lets end-users do just that. Their scalable system of APIs and an SDK lets platforms unleash the power of ‘Undo’ by giving their users the control they need to make no mistake when sending messages and payments.

Raybaby

Breathing rate, the most ignored vital is also the only vital that helps in predicting life events. Raybaby tech uses sensors, DSP and AI algorithms, to create the world’s first non-contact breathing tracker that can predict severe adverse life events, like heart attacks 24 hours before it actually happens. Founded by Ranjana, Aardra , and Sanchi — all women engineers — the tech constantly tracks breathing rate and sleeping habits of infants, the elderly and adults. Raybaby tech can monitor breathing rate with a 98% accuracy.

Wavelength Global

Wavelength pioneers a novel use of autonomous driving technology to assess driving safety and rate drivers. To do this, they deploy an efficient vision-based AI algorithm on low-power edge devices inside the car, to enable road and driver monitoring on a single device. The valuable data they’re able to capture allows them to deliver insights, risk predictors, and other data analytics to serve the insurance, ride sharing, and autonomous driving industry.

Every one of these startups is led by bright minds who are proving that some of the most groundbreaking businesses start with diverse leadership. We’re so excited to shed light on these amazing founders and their transformative ideas.

Learn more about the Qualcomm Ventures Female Founders Summit.

(*company descriptions were provided, and used with permission, by the respective companies)