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Startup accelerator Rockstart has kicked off their previously announced Artificial Intelligence programme in Den Bosch. The teams from all over the world will spend the next 180 days forming and building their products, talks with mentors and getting in touch with potential investors and customers.

Since 2011, Rockstart has been organising various accelerator programmes for startups in Amsterdam, Nijmegen and Bogotá (Colombia). This is the first program running at Rockstart’s facility in Den Bosch. Moreover, this is the first accelerator programme in Europe focused on Artificial Intelligence. Teams from Singapore, India, the US, South Africa and Italy have come to the Netherlands to work on their products and services.

According to Den Bosch alderman Jan Hoskam, “the success of the new university data science programme in Den Bosch is now followed by the establishment of data-driven activity in the Mariënburg. International startups are scouted and supported by the Rockstart Accelerator.”

The startups selected for the Rockstart AI accelerator will receive €20,000 cash and €80,000 in-kind sponsorship. They also receive office space in Den Bosch for the duration of the program and support from mentors from relevant industries.

At the end of the accelerator, on 7 March 2018, the startups will show a group of investors what they are worth. Already now, one of the main investors in Rockstart has announced that it will invest at least €200,000 in one of the participants.

These are the teams that are part of Europe’s first AI accelerator:

Airsquire (Singapore)
Airsquire builds an intelligent space inspection that can be used in the real estate sector.

Aizobot (India)
Based on experience in building software for autonomous cars in India, Aizobot is working on autonomous robots that clean, collect and remove waste and dust from streets and floors.

Baarb (United States)
Baarb is a “Netflix-like” recommendation system for travelers to book hotels. It analyzes hundreds of millions of data points, structured and unstructured, and provides personalized results.

Birds.ai (Netherlands)
The Birds.ai team makes a smart drone system for animal protection. The system was originally intended for anti-poaching operations in wildlife sanctuaries in Africa.

Cambridge Humanae (Italy)
Cambridge Humanae combines psychological testing and artificial intelligence to assess stress resistance in high-risk individuals such as soldiers, pilots, and policemen.

GeoSpark (India)
GeoSpark wants to solve the problem of high battery consumption during location tracking.

OPTOSS (Netherlands)
OPTOSS helps to prevent major incidents on critical networks and offers their customers protection against operational and cyber threats.

nFold (South Africa)
nFold offers an automatic screening system for applicants. An algorithm and workflow stack is used to ‘read’ a document like a person.

Peazy (India)
Peazy has a parking forecasting model that applies machine learning on crowdsourced GPS data to locate available parking spaces.