Cortic Technology
The rapid advancement of Artificial Intelligence is constantly boosting our productivity and influencing our everyday lives. There is a common consensus that AI will have a disruptive effect on future employment with old jobs being replaced by new ones that require AI literacy. Cortic Technology is an AI education platform provider that aims to prepare students for the future job market by stimulating curiosity and creativity in AI learning through hands-on exploration.
They are developing the Cortic AI Toolkit, CAIT, which is a powerful AI-enabled compact hardware and software platform for students, educators, and DIY enthusiasts. CAIT is a standardized hardware/software environment for students to start learning and experimenting with AI without the need to worry about hardware compatibility and software setup. They package a large number of AI components such as computer vision, voice recognition, chatbot building, text to speech, motor and sensor control, and smart home control that work seamlessly together to give students the freedom to create anything they can imagine. Their software platform makes heavy use of industrial strength container environments to make sure each component can run independently of each other to allow students to freely experiment without the fear of breaking the system.
CAIT is designed to be open so that students can make use of off-the-shelf motors, sensors, and other hardware accessories to further enhance their projects. The platform supports the Blockly visual programming language, literate programming using Jupyter notebook, and the full industrial strength Python programming language so that students of varying levels of expertise can choose the programming paradigm that is most comfortable for them.
Traction
Cortic Technology is currently in the product development stage. However, many educators have already expressed their interest in CAIT to implement their own AI curriculum. Cortic Technology will be running a workshop to teach about hands-on AI education at ISTE 2020.
The biggest hurdle the company faces in the next 12 months is to work with manufacturing partners to reduce their hardware cost and begin mass production of the product.
Team
Ye Lu, CEO – Ye has a Ph.D. in computer science and was CEO of GhostBird Software Inc. which was acquired by Yahoo in 2013.
Zhen (Jane) Wang, Chief Scientist – Jane is Professor of Electrical Engineering at UBC, Fellow of the IEEE and Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Engineering.
Him Wai (Michael) Ng, CTO – Michael has acquired an M.A.Sc. He also has five years of industry experience in developing embedded A.I. applications.
Funding
Cortic Technology raised more than $500,000 in their seed round and they are looking to raise an additional $1 million. This additional funding will help them mass produce their CAIT hardware, develop a complete K-12 level AI curriculum, construct a collaborative AI learning platform to allow students to share code, project, and get help on any AI-related topics. They will also use the funds for various marketing campaigns to promote their hardware and software platform to students, educators, and DIY makers.
Revenue Model
Their business model is to promote hardware sales to education institutions, students, and technology enthusiasts. They are also aiming to build an online AI learning platform for institutions that wish to offer AI training.
Details
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