Investing in Artificial Intelligence: How MLOps Drives Enterprise AI Wins Posted on : Jan 27 - 2022

Artificial intelligence has remained a super-hot category for good reason: It has the potential to transform nearly every industry and business.

At Insight, we’ve long been bullish on the many use cases for AI. In the past year, we’ve invested in image recognition software from Netherlands-based ScreenPoint Medical, which improves early detections of breast cancer, Covera Health, which provides a quality analytics platform to reduce medical errors in radiology, CARTO, which helps companies use and understand spatial analytics, and Laminar, a cloud data security platform to continuously monitor and protect against data leaks – among other game-changing companies. 

In total, Insight invested in 49 different companies across a broad spectrum of artificial intelligence and machine learning use cases in 2021, which represents a 172% increase from the year prior. 

As we look ahead into 2022, we expect artificial intelligence tools to continue to dominate. We see the ecosystem dividing into three primary categories: 

Layer 1 – Base platform companies: Algorithms; frameworks; infrastructure and workbenches for creating ML systems  

Layer 2 – Cross-industry capability companies: Turnkey machine learning-based systems that solve specific problems spanning multiple industries (e.g., cybersecurity) 

Layer 3 – Industry-specific companies: Applications powered by prediction or classification systems that target specific, niche use cases in one domain   

Companies and investors will find valuable AI/ML software across all three layers. At Insight, we initially focused on layers two and three. We invested in startups creating robust ML systems that addressed specific problems, either vertically (like credit underwriting company Zest AI) or horizontally (like cybersecurity company SentinelOne). We thought that economic moats were hardest to build at layer one; in part as a result of robust open source ecosystems and because large public cloud vendors deliver many of these tools at low prices. View More