Your Window Into the Innovation Economy

The insurance industry is improving its capabilities and efficiency through insurtech — the adoption of new technology to improve insurance operations. With the global insurtech market expected to grow 48.8% annually from 2021 to 2028, companies adopting technological advances will grow and improve, while those that don’t risk being surpassed by competitors.

Enterprise storage provides businesses with a centralized resource for storing, sharing, and retrieving data. However, this massive $30B industry is facing disruption due to the adoption of container-based software development, which reliably delivers up to 10x higher application density over traditional architectures. A company like Google, for example, creates billions of containers each week. Conventional enterprise storage systems are not designed for these container-driven environments, creating a sizable pain point for enterprise dev-ops and infrastructure teams.

About 20% of U.S. small businesses fail within their first year, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. A lack of business support is one of the key factors contributing to this failure rate. Alumni Ventures portfolio company Hello Alice is helping solve this problem by offering small business owners (SBOs) an enterprise/government SaaS marketplace of direct networks to help them grow and flourish.

Vertical farming (growing crops in vertically stacked layers within a controlled environment) is an innovative process working to increase the quality and speed of crop production. In addition to providing fresh produce, vertical farming also helps mitigate many environmental factors that can hinder crop development, such as, drought, pests, and extreme weather fluctuations. As the world population is expected to reach 9 billion by 2037 and increase the need for substantial food production, vertical farming has the potential to become even more valuable.

Since 1958, NASA has made significant discoveries in the realm of space exploration — from putting humans into orbit to launching numerous satellites, landing the first man on the moon, and more. Recently, NASA contracted next-gen aerospace company Axiom Space, an Alumni Ventures portfolio company, to help complete another milestone: commercializing low-Earth orbit (LEO).

Alumni Ventures portfolio company Excision Bio has made significant breakthroughs with CRISPR-based therapies using genome editing to cure viral infections at the source. The company is developing treatments that eliminate infectious viral diseases rather than suppressing or stalling their effects, with focuses on HIV as well as Herpes, Hepatitis B, and John Cunningham Virus.

Visual AI is a transformative technology that enables machines to recognize and catalog images and other visual data better than the human eye, usually by an order of magnitude. Massive datasets are used to train the AI to enable it to parse objects, actions, and states with increased accuracy, whether for public or business benefit.