New York University Abu Dhabi’s (NYUAD) StartAD innovation and entrepreneurship platform has announced that NEURAi, an artificial intelligence powered business analytics platform, as the winning startup of its 10-day hardware Venture Launchpad programme.
With its win, NEURAi received a grant of $10,000 through the Etihad Airways Innovation Kickstart Award, which will also see team members work closely with and by mentored by Etihad and startAD to build their prototype at Al Warsha, startAD’s lab at NYU Abu Dhabi.
Held in partnership with ADNOC Distribution, Etihad Airways and Crescent Enterprises, the Venture Launchpaid programme aspires to strengthen the UAE’s entrepreneurial ecosystem and enable the development of technology startups in emerging and significant local industries including energy, aviation, logistics, fintech and smart transportation.
‘StartAD’s strategy to catalyze Abu Dhabi and the UAE’s entrepreneurship ecosystem has gained significant momentum with close to 100 startups going through our programmes in the last 18 months,” said startAD managing director Ramesh Jagannathan, who is also an NYUAD research professor of engineering and vice provost for innovation and entrepreneurship.
“In this edition of the hardware Venture Launchpad programme, we brought together promising artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning-based startups in sectors of regional importance such as transportation, shipping, logistics and aviation,” he added.
“It is a great opportunity for startups like NEURAi to work closely with our partners to further develop their products and pilot their MVPs on partner platforms.”
According to NEURAi, the startup will now work with Etihad to jointly create a product for the aviation industry, which is still largely dependent on legacy systems.
“We have been extremely pleased with the quality of ideas presented and we look forward to working with the winner to help them deliver on their business plan,” said Etihad Airways CEO Peter Baumgartner.
“The winner, NEURAi, is an early stage startup hoping to democratize analytics, allowing business end users to query and receive automated insights using natural language processing and AI-based machine learning.”
“We believe that this technology will have great applicability to our business and we are excited to work with them in the future,” he added.
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