Is Artificial Intelligence About to Land?

Introducing Landing AI

Andrew Ng's New Startup

Asians and Asian-Americans make up some of the most important people in the future of artificial intelligence. Witness Andrew Ng. Andrew Yan-Tak Ng is a British-born American computer scientist and technology entrepreneur focusing on machine learning and AI. Ng was a co-founder and head of Google Brain and was the former Chief Scientist at Baidu, building the company's Artificial Intelligence Group into a team of several thousand people.

Ng has done a lot of democratize AI too. Ng co-founded Coursera and deeplearning.ai. His parents are both immigrants from Hong Kong.

The former founder of Google Brain has a new startup. On LinkedIn it appears over to have over 70 employees. Artificial intelligence pioneer Andrew Ng, the founder of the Google Brain research lab and the former chief scientist of Baidu, has raised $57 million from investors for his start-up, Landing AI.

So what does it do?

Founded in Palo Alto in 2017, Landing AI is focused on bringing artificial intelligence to manufacturing companies. It has developed a computer vision tool that manufacturers can use to create their own visual inspection software.

• Landing AI was founded in 2017 by Ng, an adjunct professor at Stanford, formerly an associate professor and director of the university’s Stanford AI Lab.
• Landing AI’s flagship product is LandingLens, a platform that allows companies to build, iterate, and deploy AI-powered visual inspection solutions for manufacturing.

Landing AI empowers customers to harness the business value of AI by providing enablement tools and transformation programs. One of the company’s core products is LandingLens, an end-to-end AI platform specifically designed for industrial customers to build, deploy and scale AI-powered visual inspection solutions. 

Landing AI competes with the likes of San Mateo-headquartered Chooch.ai. So far, Landing AI’s customers include U.S. industrial tools maker Stanley Black & Decker and Taiwanese electronics manufacturer Foxconn.

AI is still a very hot space. The amount of money flowing into AI start-ups has been rising steadily over the last decade. Venture capital analysis firm Dealroom predicts that investors will pump around $90 billion into AI start-ups this year, up from around $60 billion in 2020.

If you've heard of Softbank's AI Fund you know they target companies on the bleeding edge of AI as well. So who are the VCs that led the round? Intel Capital and Samsung Catalyst Fund both participated in Landing AI’s series A funding round, as did Insight Partners and the Canadian Pension Plan Investment Board. The investment was led by McRock Capital.

Ng said he plans to use the funding to try and “make everything go faster.” That involves doubling the team from 75 to around 150, while also bringing on new customers, he explained. Ng is one of the most interesting personalities in AI.

So where is the product-market fit? “In manufacturing, every factory does something different, so the problem becomes how we can help 10,000 manufacturers build 10,000 different models without having to hire a lot of manpower.” I think Ng is talking about how manufacturing will become more automated.

In a brief testimony on Landing AI’s website, Andrew Liou, Foxconn’s executive vice president, says that Landing’s AI has shortened Foxconn’s development time and increased the accuracy of its AI system. So this might also be about AI optimizing already existing AI systems.

AI is expected to create $13 trillion of realized value to the world’s economy by 2030, according to a McKinsey study. Ng says not much of that is realized yet, as it remains challenging to build different AI models. 

In addition, Insight Partners, Taiwania Capital, Canadian Pension Plan Investment Board, Intel Capital, Samsung Catalyst Fund, Far Eastern Group’s DRIVE Catalyst, Walsin Lihwa, and AI Fund participated, bringing Landing AI’s total raised to around $100 million.

How data centric is manufacturing becoming? The increased use of AI in manufacturing is dovetailing with the broader corporate sector’s embrace of digitization. According to Google Cloud, 76% of manufacturing companies turned to data and analytics, cloud, and AI technologies due to the pandemic.

How about digital transformation? As pandemic-induced challenges snarl the supply chain, including skilled labor shortages and transportation disruptions, the adoption of AI is likely to accelerate. Deloitte reports that 93% of companies believe that AI will be a pivotal component in driving growth and innovation in manufacturing.

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