The Deep Tech Revolution: Rapid Changes Coming to A Future Near You

by Bernard Moon and Frank Meehan, Co-founders at the SparkLabs Group

The SparkLabs Group has been active in deep tech, or frontier tech, since our inception in 2013. We have invested in a broad definition of deep tech companies which includes blockchain & cryptocurrencies, VR & AR, transportation & logistics, industrial IoT, artificial intelligence, health & wellness (i.e. sensor related, genomics, and advanced biotech technologies), and space technologies. Under this definition, 25% of our overall portfolio (38 out of 155 companies across our investment entities) were deep tech investments.

Additionally, some of our team members prior to SparkLabs, were deeply engaged in some of these frontier sectors. Frank Meehan, at his prior firm led the investment into DeepMind and invested in Siri while sitting on their board until it was acquired by Apple. Our co-founder, Jimmy Kim, is a co-founder and founding CEO of N3N, which was Cisco’s first industrial IoT investment worldwide.

Read our research report here on Slideshare

With this accumulated knowledge, we were tempted to provide you with our prediction of humankind’s demise due to the rapid ascent of artificial intelligence accompanied by a handy future guide to navigating through a post-apocalyptic world. Think “Escape from New York” meets “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” or “Mad Max” meets “Canterbury Tales” but our other partners didn’t want to create chaos in pockets of conspiracy loving groups in our world.

Instead we decided to create an easy to read (horribly boring compared to our original idea) overview for people to get up to speed in this broad category that covers many rapidly changing fields of technology. Here is our full report and the following are some highlights of what we learned so far.

Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning

Artificial intelligence’s impact will be in many sectors. The technology will directly and indirectly affect many aspects of our businesses and day-to-day lives.

We appreciate Adam Cheyer and others for providing their direct insights for our research report!

The impact of AI on the workplace is incredibly interesting, as we believe it will accelerate the shift of power from West to East. In Asia, China and Singapore recognize the huge impact that AI will bring, and both are spending billions on re-educating their workforces, training millions in AI and machine learning in preparation for the future. This will result in more talented AI researchers and developers than the West, opening many more possibilities for AI development and education in Asia. It is entirely possible that the next major breakthrough in AI comes outside Silicon Valley, just like DeepMind which was built in London, as Silicon Valley continues to underestimate the rapid development of AI research in the rest of the world.

KroniKare is from our partnership with EF Singapore as their exclusive co-investment fund. Kadho went through the 9th batch at SparkLabs Seoul.

Blockchain & Cryptocurrency

Before three years ago, we have been big believers in blockchain, but hesitant on cryptocurrencies until our investments in Cryex, a cryptocurrency exchange in Stockholm, and Sentbe, the leading bitcoin remittance company in South Korea. We believed that blockchain is revolutionary and that it will change and disrupt many industries because it can be more secure, transparent, and efficient than existing systems today. Financial institutions, energy, security, governments, healthcare, and many others will be disrupted as blockchain matures.

Read our research report here on Slideshare

Today, we believe that cryptocurrencies will also be revolutionary and that these are not tulips, beanie babies, or pet rocks. Will there be price adjustments along these rocket ship rides? Yes, but Bitcoin, Ethereum and other cryptocurrencies are here to stay and will change societies. The definition of money, the flow of money across the globe, and our trust (for the better) will all change due to cryptocurrencies.

Industrial IoT

Overall, we see the IoT market as a huge opportunity for entrepreneurs. We have invested in 7 IoT startups from our global seed fund, SparkLabs Global. All of these are consumer-facing hardware companies. While we are still excited about the consumer arena, we do see greater potential in industrial IoT market, and reflective of this trend was our first batch in our IoT and smart city accelerator. Thirteen out of the sixteen companies were industrial IoT and many of them were non-hardware startups.

Read our research report here on Slideshare

With over 13 billion devices and the majority of them connected to enterprises, we see it as only a matter of time before real revenues and value is created. Overall, the industrial IoT market is early with companies still trying to figure out business models and consistent revenue streams. Billions of data points are being collected by many companies, but the question is whether these are the right data points, what corporations should do with this information and what is the business model behind these accumulations of data?

VR & AR

While we anxiously await Apple’s launch into augmented reality, our team have been supporters of VR and AR but with a longer view. We believe the content hasn’t caught up with the technologies.

We don’t believe it will be similar long road as video-on-demand (VOD), but it will take a few more years. Time Warner’s Full Service Network experiment launched in 1994 and VOD took over ten years to really become a ubiquitous service, but VOD had the opposite problem that is facing VR & AR today. They had all the content, but the technology was too expensive to implement on a mass scale. VOD really hit the mass market when Google acquired YouTube in 2006 and Netflix launched its VOD service in 2007.

Thanks, Robert, for your insights for our report and continued evangelism of all things tech!

VR & AR’s technology is almost there besides some clunky headsets, but the primary issue is having enough engaging content. Apple’s ARKit, which was released in June, and upcoming announcement might be the tipping point for AR to go beyond the fad of Pokemon Go.

You can look at the other sectors in our research report here while contemplating a few questions. What amazing technologies and innovations do you see around you? What technology do you believe will have the most impact in our world? How will people’s lives improve through these new technologies? Please feel free to leave a comment. Thank you!

Bernard Moon and Frank Meehan are co-founders and Partners at the SparkLabs Group.