Munich, Let's Dive Into the Italian AI Ecosystem with TUM.ai

Last month, TUM.ai went on a company tour in Italy. We visited six companies focused on the application of AI in different domains ranging from space satellites to investing and finance.

At TUM.ai , we aim at lowering the entry bar to AI by empowering anyone to obtain practical experience through a diverse set of applied AI projects: Makeathon, Industry Projects, AI Entrepreneurship Lab, and AI Academy. In these projects, we learn by doing, but we also learn from partners who have been in the industry for quite some time.

Let us give you a glimpse of what’s going on behind the curtains and invite you to this trip with us!

Our first stop: Turin.

Turin is well known for its Baroque, Rococo, Neo-classical, and Art Nouveau architecture. Beautiful examples of these architectural styles are found throughout the city, from the stunning Royal Palace of Turin to the many churches and palaces located throughout the city center.

AIKO

The first company we visited is a direct representation of this. With an office in the mansard of an old Italian building with beautiful stucco on the walls, AIKO - Infinite ways to autonomy is the mix of classical culture and modern technology. Founded in 2019, they closed a seed round with 1.1 million dollars in 2021.

Focusing on artificial intelligence and automation technologies for space, AIKO - Infinite ways to autonomy strives to confer space assets with intelligence and enable cost-effective operations in space. With their products orbital_OLIVER, cloudy_CHARLES, and speedy_SKYLAR they embarked on a fascinating journey - bringing AI to space. AIKO CIO Mattia Varile and the team introduced us to their company, and culture and answered the questions from our members.

REPLY

From the cozy Italian office of a successful startup we took a tram right to the headquarters of a company with €1,78 billion in revenue in 2021 - Reply .

Reply is located in 17 countries & is a mother company to 200+ companies. 12.500+ people working there, 38 nationalities, and over 150 partnerships with universities - Reply is a decentralized network of specialized companies. Each country and company have mostly its own focus, like AWS, autonomous vehicles, financial services, etc. Though the works of the companies might overlap, they don’t compete but collaborate.

Among many topics Reply succeeds in, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning are in high regard, which is why we were super excited to visit Reply. The amazing talk about the company and AI department was delivered by Francesco Amorosini .

REPLY - Area42

From the robot carrier to the Metaverse personal assistant, from drones for warehouses to blockchain for energy selling and maintenance protocols for cars in Area42, cutting-edge ideas come to life. Area42 is Reply ’s development center where technological innovation becomes reality, as they state themselves.

It is an open office that seems almost museum-like, as there is no distinction between where people work on the future next to exhibits from the past, highlighting the buildings' great history. Reply ’s headquarters are located in Turin, Italy, in FIAT’s legendary Lingotto building. At its peak, the Lingotto car factory was the largest in the world. It was considered avant-garde and influential for its time, with Le Corbusier, a famous Swiss-French architect, praising it as "one of the most impressive sights in industry" and a "guideline for town planning". Over the course of its lifetime, 80 different models of car were produced there, including the 1936 Fiat Topolino.

We were able to see and get to know people working at various Labs inside the area42. Highlights included:

• Metaverse Lab, where Reply focuses on making a metaverse assistant as seamless and as human-like as possible. We got to try it and actually talked to the assistant and were blown away - mannerisms, way of speech, pauses while talking - the experience sure was very life-like. The metaverse assistant is not the only thing worth mentioning. At the Metaverse Lab, they utilize the most advanced XR technologies, cloud services, AI and ML algorithms, and Wearable devices to design and develop Augmented Reality solutions tailored to customers' needs.?
• Autonomous Warehouse Lab, where using drones the process of warehouse management is skyrocketing efficiency. Various technologies are being developed and tested out there - including drones, intelligent software that exploits Machine Learning algorithms, Computer Vision techniques, sensors, and AGVs (Automated Guided Vehicles).?
• Last-Mile Delivery Lab, where a robot is being tested out that might soon be used for the deliveries, helping workers and just about anyone with carrying things around.

We have also visited the Robotics Lab with Boston Dynamics robotics, the Connected Products Lab, and the Blockchain Lab at Reply 's Area 42.

Nuance

Modern innovations and bold decisions helped this established company develop rapidly enough to get recently acquired by 微软 . 纽昂司 pioneered the commercial voice recognition industry more than 20 years ago. Right now, they are focusing on a lot of industries and a great variety of companies, from startups to global brands, with a focus on healthcare, telecommunications, financial services, and education.

For two decades, 纽昂司 has been researching and developing speech and language recognition tools, anti-spoofing, age and tone detection, and various other speech-related technologies.

One of their projects, DAX (Dragon Ambient eXperience) is used to help doctors automate clinical documentation. As the whole product evolved from a single project for radiologists and has grown into a product that is being developed by a team of more than 100! Their vision for the future is to remove human expert revisions of the automatically generated summary of the conversation between the doctor and the patient, completely automatizing the tedious documentation process doctors go through on a daily basis. This would aid doctors to win precious time they could use to help their patients.

Day 2: Milan.

Milan... This city is known for its cuisine, fashion, and design. Design? You are just in the right place with the companies we visited on our second day in Italy.

FoolFarm

FOOLFARM , Deep-Tech Software Venture Builder founded in 2021, with a beautiful loft office - and a very own rooftop with a great view over the office districts of Milan - is a team of passionate people who accompany founders from idea to building a profitable venture. FoolFarm's motto “From Zero to Market” is also applicable to developing their own ideas.

FOOLFARM is the first European AI & Blockchain venture builder. FoolFarm is not an incubator or an accelerator; instead, they have a unique data-driven perspective. FoolFarm Spa supports startups that revolve around a wide range of technologies including NLP/NLU, Identity Certification, Augmented Reality, NFTs, Blockchain, Audio Analysis Models, and? Digital Twins. They not only support founders on their entrepreneurial journey, they also match founders with each other or provide startup ideas for external founders to take on.

FOOLFARM consists of 3 business units:

• the Lab: where startups start from scratch
• the Garage: where FoolFarm acts like an external innovation hub and as a startup “co-founding” entity
• the Spark: where innovation on corporates takes place

FOOLFARM invests in entrepreneurial projects capable of changing the world and provides startups with the relevant network they need to grow and scale.

It was amazing getting to know Paolo Spiga , Alessandro Redaelli , Alessandro Bonetto , and Carola Lafuenti at FoolFarm Spa!

MDOTM

MDOTM Ltd | AI-Driven Investment Solutions for Asset & Wealth Managers offers a wide variety of products for investors: portfolio advisory, AI support for the investment process, and the Sphere - their own platform launched in 2022 that uses the power of AI to help customers navigate market complexity, manage portfolios, and guide investment decisions.

MDOTM Ltd | AI-Driven Investment Solutions for Asset & Wealth Managers products are currently being used to manage $60B+ dollars in assets. They gave us a live demonstration of the product, and Lorenzo Malanga , VP of Research at MDOTM, introduced us to the AI behind it.

With over 50 people working from offices in London and Milan (and New York on the way), they are a team of highly-qualified individuals working to develop and deliver the best technology in investment decision-making.

The company's motto is what really struck and stuck with us: "Love the problem, not your solution". Loving the solution can cause all sorts of problems, including not being able to see a better-fitting one due to being attached to the previous way of thinking; furthermore, it is easy to get caught up in the details of one's solution and lose sight of the problem at large.

Special thanks to ?? Alessio Fiore , Francesco Orsini , Andrea Sala , and Lorenzo Malanga for introducing us to their company and product!

iGenius

iGenius , a company founded in 2016, is on a mission to accelerate the adoption of decision intelligence by consumerizing access to information, disrupting the business data industry with its proprietary composite AI.

The new tool from iGenius , Crystal, is well-designed, easy to use and, according to the team, has the potential to overthrow PowerBI and Tableau in some companies. With its natural language query search, anyone can find relevant information and present it in seconds.

The iGenius team hosted a small hackathon just for us, enabling us to have some hands-on experience with their tool. We split into three teams and tried to tell a convincing story navigating through example data generated by a company with Crystal.

Beautifully designed and equipped with voice recognition for queries and prompts based on the data, the tool is intuitive and can be used by anyone in the company. Collaboration mode and support for several languages make the platform especially attractive to customers around the globe.

Special thanks to Nicolas Pantaleo , Giovanni Cugliari , Vittorio Giatti , and the team for inviting us to iGenius and showing us their product!

TUM.ai - Who we are

TUM.ai is the leading AI student initiative in Germany with over 150+ members. Since our founding in 2020, we've experienced explosive growth and collaborated with both established and up-and-coming companies. Our partners include 微软 , 谷歌 , appliedAI Initiative GmbH , 德勤 , IBM , OpenAI , Presize (acq. by Meta) , avi , 罗兰贝格 , QuantCo , and many more.

.