Every second of every day, people around the world are publishing research papers and launching new startups that leverage computer vision, machine learning, and artificial intelligence.

Researchers and professors want their work to be noticed in the midst of a flood of new work.

Entrepreneurs want to build valuable businesses, get covered in Techcrunch, Wired, Wall Street Journal, want to raise financing and want happy customers.

We want to help you!

We have been organizing the premier annual visual technology summit since 2014 called the LDV Vision Summit with the main focus of showcasing brilliant people like YOU!

Entering competitions increases your odds of being recruited, raising capital, or selling for over $100M because your work becomes visible to an audience of actors working to advance your field.  The key is to focus on attending and competing where it is most contextually relevant for you to further your goals. If you’re in visual tech, that means the LDV Vision Summit.

We bring together top technologists, researchers, startups, media/brand executives, creators and investors with the purpose of exploring how visual technologies leveraging computer vision, machine learning and artificial intelligence are revolutionizing how humans communicate and do business.

Speakers and judges come from Apple, Cornell Tech, Qualcomm, NBCUniversal, Stanford, Facebook, MIT, Greylock Partners, CMU, Wired, Spark Capital, Nvidia, First Round Capital, Flickr, Refinery29, Lytro, Timer Warner, Samsung, Magic Leap, Ooyala, Hearst, Google and many more.

Enter and present your brilliance at our 2017 LDV Vision Summit Startup Competition or the Entrepreneurial Computer Vision Challenge (ECVC). Application deadline is March 31, 2017.  

Sean Bell, CEO & Co-Founder, GrokStyle from Cornell Tech. ©Robert Wright/LDV Vision Summit
Sean Bell, CEO & Co-Founder, GrokStyle from Cornell Tech. ©Robert Wright/LDV Vision Summit

 Past competitors in the ECVC, like 2016 winner, GrokStyle, have reaped the rewards of competing. “The most valuable part of the Vision Summit was connecting with three different companies potentially interested in building on our technology, and with four different potential investors/advisors,” said CEO & Co-founder Sean Bell after the Vision Summit.

Divyaa Ravichandran, from CMU and she showcased her project “Love & Vision” ©Robert Wright/LDV Vision Summit
Divyaa Ravichandran, from CMU and she showcased her project “Love & Vision” ©Robert Wright/LDV Vision Summit

For other 2016 ECVC competitors like Divyaa Ravichandran, who was a recent graduate of Carnegie Mellon University at the time, “attendance at LDV Vision Summit last year gave me visibility and I came in contact with my current employer at Facebook!”

Rosanna Myers CEO & Co-Founder, Carbon Robotics Startup Competition Winner ©Robert Wright/LDV Vision Summit
Rosanna Myers CEO & Co-Founder, Carbon Robotics Startup Competition Winner ©Robert Wright/LDV Vision Summit

2016 Startup Competition winner, Carbon Robotics, was looking to “connect with recruits and investors in NYC. The experience was great for that. Getting to pitch on the main stage was amazing, because it made it easy for people to learn about what we’re working on. After the pitch, we were approached by tons of high-quality engineers and potential partners, so it was a great success,” said Rosanna Myers CEO & Co-founder.

“Following the summit, [London based startup] The Smalls raised investment with an angel investor who was in the audience. The funding was used to make key hires and improve technology. The Smalls has continued to grow at 300% per year and now has offices in both London and Singapore,” reports CEO & Founder of The Smalls, Kate Tancred after finalizing in the 2015 Startup Competition.

The 2017 LDV Vision Summit on May 24 & 25 in NYC will include over 80 international speakers with the purpose of exploring, understanding, and shaping the future of imaging and video in human communication. The best startups and computer vision experts who compete in the Startup Competition and the ECVC will be showcased alongside these industry leaders.

The Startup Competition is for promising visual technology companies with less than $1.5M in funding.

The ECVC is for any Computer Vision, Machine Learning and/or Artificial Intelligence students, professors, experts or enthusiasts working on a unique solution that leverages visual data to empower businesses and humanity. It provides contestants the opportunity to showcase the technology piece of a potential startup company without requiring a full business plan. It is a unique opportunity for students, engineers, researchers, professors and/or hackers to test the waters of entrepreneurism.

Competitions are open to anyone working in our visual technology sector such as: photography, videography, medical imaging, analytics, robotics, biometrics, LIDAR, radar, satellite imaging, computer vision, machine learning, artificial intelligence, augmented reality, virtual reality, autonomous vehicles, media and entertainment, gesture recognition, search, advertising, cameras, e-commerce, visual sensors, sentiment analysis and much more.

Judges for the competitions include top industry venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, journalists, media executives and companies that are recruiting. Past judges included Josh Elman of Greylock, Tamara Berg of U. North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Larry Zitnick of Facebook, Andy Weisman of Union Square Ventures, Ramesh Raskar, of MIT Media Lab, Alex Iskold of Techstars, Gaile Gordon from Enlighted, Jessi Hempel of Wired and many more. The list of phenomenal 2017 judges continues to evolve on the 2017 Competition’s website.

All competition sub-finalists will receive remote and in-person coaching by Evan Nisselson and in person mentoring during the sub-finalist judging session by Jan Erik Solem, Rebecca Paoletti, Andy Parsons, Evan Nisselson, Serge Belongie and other experts.

It would be a horrible feeling to be sitting behind your computer or in the audience when someone else presents an idea that you had years ago. Take a risk, prove yourself, compete.

We are waiting to see YOUR brilliance!

Enter and present your brilliance at our 2017 LDV Vision Summit Startup Competition or the Entrepreneurial Computer Vision Challenge (ECVC). Application deadline is March 31, 2017.  

Author: Evan Nisselson

Evan Nisselson is General Partner of LDV Capital. LDV Capital is a thesis-driven early-stage venture fund investing in people building visual technology businesses that leverage computer vision, machine learning, and artificial intelligence to analyze visual data. The Annual LDV Vision Summit in NYC is the premier global gathering in visual technologies.

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