The inaugural Cluj Hackathon, the first hackathon in Romania focused on Artificial Intelligence, and Generative AI took place between June 16-18, 2023, at the Bosch Engineering Center Cluj. More than 115 participants, organized into 43 teams, enthusiastically joined the hackathon, making it one of the most successful events of this kind in Romania.

For three days, the participants had the opportunity to build and develop revolutionary applications and platforms, with access to high-quality mentoring, a wide range of resources, and networking opportunities, with participants from across the country. 

Remarkably, the youngest contestants in the hackathon were two boys, aged only 12, who independently acquired coding skills at home. Motivated to learn new things and connect with like-minded individuals, they opted to participate. With the guidance of mentors, they successfully developed an AI story generator. “It feels immensely gratifying when you code something and witness its functionality. That’s what drives me,” expressed Prisăcaru Thomas, one of the youngest participants in the hackathon.

The inception of the hackathon took shape when Adrian Vlasiu discovered the boundless potential of ChatGPT. His early engagement with OpenAI’s groundbreaking technology evoked a “deja-vu” moment, similar to the iPhone’s initial market launch. Fuelled by this profound insight, Vlasiu resolved to orchestrate a hackathon, thereby providing a platform for others to explore and harness the transformative power of this remarkable technological advancement.

“I wanted to organize the biggest hackathon in Cluj. And I wanted to organize the Untold Festival of hackathons to set a new standard in terms of satisfaction for the participants, satisfaction for the sponsors, and the whole overall experience of the competition. The engaging format of the Cluj Hackathon proved to be a winning recipe because the participants saw a different hackathon format. It’s not just about the competition or the prizes; it’s all about building community, engaging with each other, and succeeding by helping others succeed. We had very generous sponsors and top-class companies like Bosch that enabled us the hackathon location within Cluj-Napoca at the Bosch Engineering Center Cluj, one of the smartest buildings in the office scene in Romania. Untold Festival and Banca Transilvania supported our initiative, giving us a huge boost of confidence. And, of course, we had a scorching topic, artificial intelligence, and ChatGPT.”, said Adrian Vlasiu, founder of the Cluj Hackathon.

Out of the 43 teams which took part, team TestBusters emerged triumphant as they won the first prize in the hackathon. Their creation, an AI-powered solution for automated software testing, showcased ingenuity that pleased all the judges. There were other outstanding projects, and eventually, the score was tight. However, when measured against the hackathon’s primary objective of delivering a functional product within the allotted time, TestBusters stood firmly at the forefront, embodying the essence of the event.

“We have created a solution that uses artificial intelligence to test applications automatically, but not only does the test, it also creates tests automatically. With artificial intelligence, it’s possible to automate more and do more. Basically, those tests are needed in every software or manufacturing firm, so we can solve them by automating them. The goal of this kind of application is ease of use. The product manager or the product owner can use it because it’s very simplified; you don’t need to know how to code; you need to fill out a form, and the computer will be able to understand what you want to do.” explained their solution, Gaëtan de Smet and Stan Ciprian, two of the members of the winning team.

The second place was awarded to the Tech Titans, who worked on detecting anomalies in a dataset from a sensor system (car batteries). Their project underscores the importance of data analysis in solving real-world issues. And, not to be overshadowed, Brainiax took the third spot for their effective solution for detecting potholes on the road. As one of the lead engineers from Bosch pointed out, detecting and analyzing potholes on the road in real-time is one of the toughest engineering challenges in the auto industry today.

A team of mentors from diverse backgrounds in technology and entrepreneurship extended unwavering support to the hackathon participants. Their invaluable expertise and guidance catalyzed innovation and critical thinking, nurturing an environment where teams could thrive and unleash their true potential. Through their mentorship, these seasoned professionals empowered the participants, enabling them to transcend boundaries and realize their ideas.

“We started with 43 teams. I was amazed by how motivated they were and how fast they developed a functional prototype that fit the purpose they created it for. It was an excellent start for the participants, and I think that maybe all the startups should go through a hackathon at some point to kickstart their idea.”, said Smaranda Ignat, mentor.

“I’ve seen some great ideas, for example, one team taking care of the blind people and trying to integrate them in society by offering an easier integration in the digital world, like websites that can be translated into Braille, using speech-to-text. I’ve learned a lot from the teams. I believe this mentorship experience happened from both sides. I hope to see at least one or two of the teams hopping to the next stage and talking to some investors.” added Victor Dinică, mentor.

The host for the hackathon was none other than the Bosch Engineering Center Cluj. Renowned for its cutting-edge work in developing software and hardware solutions for automated, electric, and connected driving technologies, the center boasts an end-to-end approach. Bosch Engineering Center Cluj is a pivotal software hub in the realm of automated driving innovation, from crafting the software integrated within the vehicle to the cloud-based software that facilitates seamless connectivity.

“We’ve hosted the Cluj Hackathon to enable the community to grow because AI is a promising technology. Reflecting on our collaborative internal working environment, one of our goals as an engineering center is to develop with the local and international communities. We cannot do a one-man-show these days, it takes teams to build big things, and as a reflection of that, we want to be part of the community, the ecosystem and develop together with the universities, other companies, and startups.”, said Cătălin Golban, responsible for the Department developing Computer Vision technology for automated driving at Bosch Engineering Center Cluj.

When considering productivity enhancements, implementing AI can yield significant optimizations across various job domains, encompassing software development and testing. However, the realm of technology development is also profoundly impacted. Notably, Bosch has been harnessing the power of AI for an extensive duration, commencing a decade ago with the ambitious objective of assembling a team specializing in computer vision for automated driving. The outcomes of this endeavor have been truly remarkable, with millions of cars worldwide currently equipped with AI-based technology crafted by the Engineering Center situated in Cluj-Napoca.

“For us, AI is not new, but we see more and more new models emerging, which help us solve problems that previously were either unsolvable or maybe were solved by rather traditional algorithmic methods. The ecosystem consisting of startups and companies needs to adapt, it needs to professionally convert people in the software area to get familiar with using AI when developing features and as productivity tools. I think we should, as a community, not miss that train.

I also think such hackathons’ social and learning parts are essential. People came here to learn not only about technology but also how to pitch ideas and present what they think. I believe that big things can be done in teams, through collaboration, by sharing know-how and exchanging ideas; this is how the community will grow. Events like Cluj Hackathon are a big boost for the community.”, added Cătălin Golban.

With their sights set on the future, the organizers expressed their aspiration for the Cluj Hackathon to become an enduring tradition, extending its legacy into the upcoming year. Driven by an unwavering commitment to excellence, they seek to elevate the standards of hackathon organization, aiming to amplify the event’s quality and the unparalleled value it delivers to participants. By striving for the maximum return on investment, the organizers are relentlessly creating an even more remarkable and rewarding experience for all involved.

The post The story behind the success of Cluj’s biggest hackathon: a journey of community and innovation appeared first on Startups&TheCity.

Veridion (formerly known as Soleadify) announces a $6 million late seed round to expand to US and further develop their proprietary AIs that are specifically trained to understand the global business landscape, enabling their clients, including tier 1 consultancies and market intelligence firms, to access reliable data on 80 million businesses worldwide, saving thousands of hours of manual research and achieving record accuracy and refresh rates.

The deep tech startups raised the seed round from LAUNCHub Ventures, OTB Ventures, Underline Ventures, and existing investors Day One Capital and GapMinder Venture Partners.

Veridion leverages the power of AI to revolutionize big data and to comprehend billions of webpages every week in order to build and maintain a highly accurate, global scale, near real-time, single-source-of-truth database of company data made available through a Complex Search API and a Matching & Enriching API.

They are one of the first companies to deploy AI at this scale for data acquisition, setting them apart from the traditional firmographic data players that buy data from government registries as well as simple web-scraping alternative data providers.

Firmographic data is information that can be used to categorize organizations by a host of information such as business activity, products or services offered, location, employees, industry, technology offered etc. Enterprises are missing reliable, up-to-date information about market participants and a lack of those crucial insights leads to sub-optimal decisions and challenges when navigating through dynamically changing environments.

Veridion is positioned to be a firmographic intelligence leader, boasting a database of over 60 data points on over 80 million businesses with record accuracy rates and the highest refresh rate on the market.

Veridion saw solid growth figures in 2022, with over 3x increase in recurring revenue and an impressive zero churn in clients. Their biggest clients include, among others, tier 1 consultancies with specialized procurement and insurance teams, one of the largest global insurtech platforms, procurement platforms, and top tier market intelligence companies. There are multiple reasons for this, key among which is their highly granular data, the control their APIs offer on confidence scores and their internal matching engine which allows them to pinpoint businesses at unprecedented rates.

The name change is intended to highlight the company’s unique standing in the market, their commitment to being a single source of truth and reflect the company’s ambitious plans for future growth.

Florin Tufan, founder and CEO, Veridion: “We believe that the next generation of business decision engines, regardless of industry or vertical will require a completely new format of data. Predictive models will rely on AI more than human intuition and will be capable of processing exponentially more data as their core resource. For this, the data needs to be fresh, granular, easy to work with, and integrate-able across a wide array of processes. This has been our focus from the beginning and with this round, we’ll be able to double down on our approach.”

The firmographic data market in which Veridion operates is also known as the business information market and was valued at $211 billion in 2022 and is projected to grow towards $291 billion by 2027, with new technologies like AI representing a game-changer for big data. According to Gartner’s Data Quality Market Survey, the average financial impact of bad data on organizations in 2022 was estimated to be around  $12.9 million per year.

Recent developments in ML capabilities unlocked the doors for Veridion to be positioned quite differently from other market participants. Players such as Delphai, Planck Data, and Grata have collectively raised over $110M in the past 7 years of operations and development. While companies like these cover local markets and company records in the 10 – 20 million range, Veridion boasted over 70 million company records within their first two years of activity.

Delphai covers primarily private markets for M&A, prospecting and supplier sourcing, segments where Veridion brings in-depth data on hundreds of millions of products and services and business activities in all commonly used taxonomies worldwide such as NAICS, NACE, SIC, etc on companies from all around the world. Planck Data is focused on commercial underwriting but only covers the US market as opposed to Veridion’s global coverage and Grata, which is focused primarily on deal sourcing also lacks the in-depth perspective that Veridion brings on specific company descriptions, risk signals and other rapidly expanding data points that Veridion extracts on the companies they oversee.

The biggest name in firmographic data is Dun & Bradstreet, with over 200 years experience in the field. Dun & Bradstreet and Veridion may serve slightly different market segments, but their differences are pronounced when it comes to data products and capabilities. Veridion offers a distinct advantage in its coverage of the SMB landscape, with regularly refreshed data and in-depth product-level information and retail locations. The NLP-based approach employed by Veridion also enables the extraction of unique data attributes for specific industries, such as specific underwriting and supplier risks, enabling the company to better meet the needs of its clients through custom data solutions.

After validating their data with large enterprise clients in commercial insurance underwriting, supplier discovery, and private market analysis, Veridion is releasing self-service APIs to enable faster data integration for potential clients and open up to new markets in data-centric SaaS or other early-stage solutions.

Veridion plans to continue building its US footprint by opening a New York office in 2023 to more closely support their growing base of clients in the region.

The post Bucharest-based Veridion secures $6 million to further develop their AIs tracking 80M businesses appeared first on Startups&TheCity.

XVision, a medical platform that analyzes lung X-rays using artificial intelligence, started to be used for the identification of the patients with lung injuries, associated with COVID-19. The solution, offered pro-bono, became part of the mobile laboratories for the detection of coronavirus, located in the outdoor spaces of the Institute of Pneumophysiology “Marius Nasta” in Bucharest, respectively of the Emergency Reception Units of the Emergency Clinical County Hospital in Timisoara.

This new way of medical triage will reduce the risk of contamination of other patients already admitted, but also of the medical staff. In addition, this MedTech solution supports the medical team in managing the extremely high workload during this period.

Thus, through a partnership facilitated by the Institute of Pneumophysiology “Marius Nasta” in Bucharest, XVision is used to support the triage of patients showing signs of infection with the SARS-COV-2 virus. This hospital unit has two mobile laboratories equipped with X-ray devices for tuberculosis detection. One of the laboratories was sent to the Timișoara County Hospital to facilitate the patients triage process. These mobile units will be used until the end of the pandemic to prioritize patients who require lung X-rays.

The triage system is based on an evaluation score developed by XVision’s radiologists’ team, benchmarked with the scores and standards used globally, at the time being. Based on the algorithm, it describes the similarities between the radiological patterns in the patient’s X-ray and those found in COVID-19 cases.

“XVision is a system that can be replicated and adapted in other hospitals in Romania, too, being a real support for radiologists in managing the large volume of medical images and at the same time reducing the degree of infection of the medical staff. We are already discussing with a few hospitals that we could support during this period. We express our desire to help pro-bono as many as possible medical institutions that receive patients infected with this virus”, says Stefan Iarca, one of the co-founders of the XVision project.

As part of the triage, after the X-ray is done in the mobile lab, the XVision application provides a very quick result that is analyzed by the doctors, along with the initial X-ray. Based on it, a decision is made regarding the respective medical case. XVision detects signs of pneumonia, even in incipient form, and detects the degree of resemblance to the radiological pattern of pneumonia with that specific to COVID-19.

“For the County Clinical Emergency Hospital << Pius Brinzeu >> from Timișoara, the collaboration with the Marius Nasta Pneumophysiology Institute in Bucharest is a welcome and helpful one for both the medical staff and the patients who arrive in the Emergency Receiving Unit within the healthcare unit. The engineers from XVision, with whom the hospital has already implemented an artificial intelligence program in the Radiology Laboratory, have the opportunity to test this platform, which has proven to be useful for the imaging diagnoses investigated within the Radiology Section, as well as within the mobile caravan, which arrived with us at the end of last week.

Our goal is to minimize the risk of contamination for both patients and medical personnel who are in the front line in the battle with Covid-19, beyond all the truly rigorous procedures we have set up and the protective equipment for all the medical staff and for the patients.

The program developed by XVision experts facilitates the work of radiologists, by accurately detecting lung lesions specific to the new coronavirus. Images provided by this software are viewed and checked in real time so that the diagnostic errors are minimal” stated Asist. Univ. Dr. Raul Pătrașcu, Manager of the County Clinical Emergency Hospital “Pius Brinzeu” from Timișoara.

More details on how XVision platform can be used to evaluate X-rays of patients suspected of COVID-19 are available here.

The application developed by XVision, is the first of its kind in Romania. It was implemented initially in the Timișoara County Hospital where it helps doctors analyze up to 200 lung X-rays per day, meaning 20% more than in the past.

Currently, the application generates data related exclusively to the chest area using digital X-rays as basic information. Currently the team is working on developing new algorithms that will be able to analyze chest and cranial CTs.

XVision is a Romanian startup founded in 2018 by a multidisciplinary team from Timișoara, passionate about artificial intelligence, deep learning and optimization of medical processes.

XVision uses artificial intelligence algorithms for lung X-rays analysis, assisting physicians in the diagnostic process. With the help of XVision platform, medical imagery benefits from the technological advantage offered by artificial intelligence ensuring a more efficient medical act, centered on the quality of the patient-doctor relationship.

The post XVision scans patients suspected of being infected with COVID-19 in mobile laboratories in Bucharest and Timisoara appeared first on Startups&TheCity.

In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, Timisoara-based startup XVision has announced it offers free access to its AI-based healthcare platform to any doctor who believes that this platform could ease his work in the coming period. The platform developed by XVision allows faster and easier analysis of chest radiographs with 20% more X-rays being interpreted daily, the application signaling those with pathologies and prioritizing them for visualization by radiologists.

XVision observed that a record number of chest radiographs were recorded in a partner hospital, the increasing workflow leading to the exhaustion of the doctors and to system overload. XVision uses artificial intelligence algorithms for the analysis of the pulmonary X-rays, among the radiological aspects identified being those directly correlated with pneumonia, a pathology that is also caused by COVID-19.

The doctors who would like to access the platform should contact XVision here for more details.

The startup was established two years ago, had an accelerated growth in 2019, reaching to expand nationally, the platform now being tested by hospitals in Timisoara, Oradea and Bucharest.

Last year XVision was selected in the Techcelerator acceleration program, through which they raised a total investment of € 100,000 from GapMinder Venture Partners. Techcelerator has recently launched an initiative intended to bring in one place Romanian startups that could ease the crisis situation generated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Startups can register here.

The post Romanian startup XVision offers doctors its AI analysis system to help diagnose COVID-19 faster appeared first on Startups&TheCity.

Cluj-based teleportHQ announced that it has launched the beta version of their AI-powered platform for automated generation of front-end code and design, a solution meant to keep up with the huge unmet global demand of experts in building user interfaces. The platform is addressing developers by automating their front-end work and learning their way of design, their project, and their industry scope. The project is the result of a sustained R&D effort of more than 3 years, partly financed by the European Union. 

In a digital world where everything is going to be displayed on screens, there is an increasing demand of experts in building user interfaces, and there’s simply not enough front-end developers to keep up with the demand. Today, there are about 25 million developers  around the world, from whom about 5-6 millions are front-end developers. There is a huge need for automation in the front-end development field in order to reduce costs and respond to the demand. teleportHQ decided to respond to this challenge by inserting machine learning in their platform.

When a user starts with an idea of making a website, they would have something that you would call “low definition information.” It is an idea or maybe a wireframe, and in order to get the final code from the wireframe there are a lot of decisions that have to be made. Usually those decisions are made by a designer then integrated by a developer, and with your intention and their knowledge and work, finally you get the website. The automation part of this process is all the knowledge that a team of experienced designers and developers from teleportHQ have put together and stored in what they internally are calling ‘processors’. One after the other, those processors take decisions about how your wireframe should be transformed into the final code.

Learning from their extended experience in front-end development, the teleportHQ team has found that many of the decisions that designers and developers do are similar; there are patterns. They’ve started to automate everything that they’ve detected as patterns, so that when a user will create a wireframe, the algorithm will “understand” the user intention, and will generate for them what should be the final result and code. 

teleportHQ is now working on an engine that creates predictions, which means while you’re working, the platform will propose to you the best next steps according to the training that it has received about your own behavior in the platform. This leads to a hyper personalized experience per user.

teleportHQ’s platform consists of an ecosystem composed of several parts, the most visible and understandable part being what they are calling ‘the Playground’, a SaaS platform where users can build user interfaces in a visual and efficient way.

The Playground has a wizard-like experience, what you see is what you get, but it is really advanced, meant for professional use. teleportHQ plans to add features to the platform, new experiences that are oriented for designers, content providers, and marketers. In the end, even business owners will be able to use the platform and collaborate with their peers and colleagues.

In the Playground background, a set of machine learning engines would kick in. Some of them make up the detection and transform drawings or wire frames directly into code. Other engines would make code optimizations and intermediary decisions or predictions about the user’s next actions. All these components are working together in one single ecosystem and are dramatically accelerating the speed of producing front-end development or websites.

The teleportHQ ecosystem is based on an intermediary representation format, called UIDL (an acronym for User Interface Definition Language), which could very likely become an open user interface definition language in the future. It is a JSON data structure that is code agnostic. Open source code generators are able to read this data structure and transform it into whatever type of code, supporting almost 10 frameworks to this day. On top of those two elements, the UIDL and that code generators, teleportHQ has built their platform, where you can visually do all the front-end design, with different collaboration capabilities.

Building a user interface is quite a complex process, involving up to five different types of roles. This can include the stakeholder who wants something to be done, the product owner – a proxy for the business owner, the designer, the developer, and finally the customer who would close the feedback loop. 

The discussions between all these users are usually quite hard because they have different languages and different goals. One of the most frequent issues is the interaction between designers and developers who have radically different ways of thinking. Designers think in what you would call an absolute positioning way and the developers think  more in how their code should be implemented. It is a huge pain, and a solution is yet to be found for the seamless transition from design to code or from an idea/wireframe to code. 

Most big companies in today’s industry, especially in the design side, consider that the way to fill this gap is to add some extensions to their design platform, in order for them to generate the code. teleportHQ believes that it should be done the other way around so they are building the bridge from the developer side towards the designers. This is the reason why they have launched this stage of the platform with the developers in the forefront of their minds. In the next iterations, they’re going to build layers that are more appealing or easier to use for designers, then add new layers that are more appealing for content owners, then features for marketeers, and finally features specifically designed for stakeholders. In the end, you need a context in which all those roles and people would meet together in order to finalize and very quickly discuss the final product. And this is the goal that teleportHQ ultimately wants; to have a completely integrated collaborative platform in which all these roles can see at any time the status of the project and if anybody is changing any part of the project, everybody else is kept in the loop.

The platform is professional-oriented and made for production, so this is the reason why they call it low-code, in the sense that is not a no-code platform (where you wouldn’t need any code knowledge). A minimum understanding of HTML and CSS will be required to use the platform, so it is a productivity tool, not just a consumer tool.

The world is going to have a very large population of digital citizens such as developers or students that want to learn front-end design, designers that want to learn to code or make a prototype, and even marketeers that want to make simple static websites. For this kind of users, teleportHQ offers a classical SaaS model in which you will need a bit of coding knowledge but you won’t have to type all the code. It will be a local platform that has hosting included.

But the most interesting cases are in the B2B world, where teleportHQ already has discussions and is doing prototypes with several leaders in the banking industry, the automotive industry, and several other industries, even in cloud hosting. As a result of using teleportHQ, those companies could be able to prototype their interfaces 10 to 50 times faster than they do today.

teleportHQ is also in discussion with VR partners that are interested in having the 2D experience that they’re building but in 3D, where instead of making the wireframes by using the mouse or taking pitches from the whiteboard, you would just draw them into the air while you are in a conference and maybe in a very close future just directly with holograms so that you don’t even need glasses or other augmenting parts. The first VR prototypes will start next year, and the first demos will be available online.

During their beta-launch event in Cluj, Paul Brie, teleportHQ’s CEO, also announced that they have started an important strategic partnership with the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, which has one of the main experts in the front-end development industry and will start making a technological transfer of their past 10 years of R&D towards teleportHQ. This adds to the existing partnership with the Cluj-based Romanian Institute of Science and Technology which is developing advanced artificial intelligence based methods for automatically generating web pages, which may eventually be available through the teleportHQ platform and power its AI.

Paul Brie sees the automation of front-end development as a future mark for the city of Cluj, which could become the main hub of innovation on this topic in the world in the following years: “We could say that in Cluj there’s going to be the biggest number of people in the world that are trying to solve the problem of automated front-end development. So we believe there is a huge chance that Cluj will be known as the capital of automatic front-end development, solved by machine learning. As we make progress in these discussions, more international experts will join the efforts and recognize what we are doing as principal efforts in the industry. So I’m quite confident that in a year or two from now, what we are doing here in Cluj to solve this problem will make history.”

The post Cluj-based teleportHQ launches an ‘AI-wired’ platform for automated user interface generation, setting the stage for Cluj to become one of the main hubs of front-end automation in the world appeared first on Startups&TheCity.