Today we are excited to announce the first cohort of the Radical AI Founders Masterclass program selected to receive compute grants.
The Radical AI Founders Masterclass aims to equip aspiring and emerging founders with the tools and expertise they need to transform groundbreaking research into world-class AI businesses. To better deliver on this goal, we announced a Radical AI Founders compute cluster in the fall of 2024. In partnership with Google Cloud, each selected applicant from the Radical AI Founders Masterclass community will receive access to cutting-edge infrastructure valued at over $250,000, which enables them to scale their AI models using Google TPU and Nvidia GPU state-of-the-art chips.
The large number of applications for this first cohort demonstrates the real need for compute resources at this earliest stage of commercializing AI research. Applicants were chosen from a pool of exceptional talent from top global institutions including Stanford, University of Toronto, Oxford and MIT, and leading AI organizations such as OpenAI, Meta, and Amazon. While only a small percentage of founders, representing a limited number of projects, were selected, the ambition of all applicants was truly inspiring. New and returning applicants are encouraged to continue refining their projects using the resources offered through the program, and are invited to apply to the next cohort of the program to be announced in the coming months.
12 Radical AI Founders applicants were awarded compute grants, as part of this first cohort. While several of the recipients remain in stealth mode for now and will be shared at a later date, we are delighted to introduce a few of the startups that make up this inaugural cohort.
Founding Team: Dave Vu, Arsham Ghahramani
Location: Toronto, Canada
Co-founders Dave (ex-Local Logic, Ezra) and Arsham (ex-Applied Machine Learning Lead at Amazon) are building Ribbon to help large enterprises discover top talent faster with an AI interviewing platform capable of conducting voice-based screening interviews at scale.
Founding Team: Matthew Sargent, Augustine Mavor-Parker
Location: London, UK / New York, US
Matthew and Augustine are AI researchers from University College London (UCL), where they earned their PhD in Machine Learning. They are pioneering the use of offline reinforcement learning and LLMs to uncover patterns between patient events and clinician actions in an effort to streamline clinical workflows.
Location: Seattle, US
Drawing on extensive experience scaling cloud and ML infrastructure gained at major tech companies, this team is developing an AI-powered platform for automating incident resolution. OnCallNinja’s system integrates code, documents, logs, metrics, and chat data to generate root cause analysis reports, drastically reducing incident resolution time.
Founding Team: Cam Rzadki, Ian MacPherson
Location: Toronto, Canada
Cam (MSc in Applied Computing from the University of Toronto) and Ian (PhD candidate in computer vision at York University) bring deep expertise in high-throughput screening and medical image processing. Their platform leverages AI agents to automate bioimage analysis for pharmaceutical and biotech companies to accelerate therapeutic discovery.
BRICS 4D AI
Founding Team: Srinath Sridhar
Location: Boston Area, US
Srinath Sridhar is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Brown University, Director of the Interactive 3D Vision Lab (IVL), and co-director of Brown Visual Computing. The Brown Interaction Capture System (BRICS) captures and processes 4D spatial data (3D + time) using specialized cameras, compute systems, and AI models to enable real-world spatial intelligence beyond traditional 2D approaches.
Founding Team: Yonatan Feleke, Henok Ademtew
Location: San Francisco, US
Yonatan (ex-LinkedIn, Qualcomm) and Henok (a NeurIPS published ML Engineer) are building an AI-powered smart inbox that reimagines email through contextual smart cards for different use cases. Their platform leverages fine-tuned foundational models to make everyday internet experiences more convenient, starting with email.
Location: Cambridge, UK
A team of researchers from the University of Cambridge is seeking to revolutionize visual chart understanding with generative AI.
We’re thrilled to support these startups on their journey to commercialize AI innovations.
To learn more about the Radical AI Founders Masterclass program and the Radical AI Founders compute cohort, visit: https://radical.vc/masterclass/
