SAN FRANCISCO, March 05, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- CrowdSmart, Inc., today unveiled the Collective Intelligent Investing (CII) platform, a new method to improve early-stage startup investing. CII brings order, transparency and better accuracy to the uncertainty often associated with startup investing.
Over the past four years CrowdSmart has focused on proving its prediction accuracy by replacing “who you know” with “what you know” and leveraging the power of artificial intelligence (AI) and diverse domain expertise to more accurately assess startup readiness for investment and to propel startup opportunities.
CII is based on established prediction science, Collective Intelligence and Bayesian Learning. With Bayesian Learning, human predictions become more accurate as a diversity of opinions and facts become known, which also improves the AI statistical model over time. Using algorithms created with natural language processing (NLP) and Machine Learning (ML), CII turns the qualitative assessments shared by CrowdSmart’s community of experienced investors, domain experts, and market influencers into predictive quantitative data that feeds an ever-improving AI predictive scoring engine, resulting in a score of the startup’s likelihood to receive significant follow-on funding at higher valuations.
“CII taps diverse relevant knowledge, not one individual or a small group of experts,” said Thomas Kehler, Ph.D., president, chief scientist and co-founder of CrowdSmart. “AI predictions informed by knowledgeable participants, who are carefully chosen for relevant expertise and diversity, will substantially and consistently outperform predictions by the best individual experts. CII outperforms both individual predictions and computer-based predictions,” added Kehler.
“Investing using CII has been a game-changer,” said David Ochi, angel investor. “CrowdSmart has enabled me to quickly build a diversified portfolio of startup investments more efficiently and most importantly, with improved results.”
CrowdSmart is continually building its datasets and investment results over the past four years are positive and promising:
- CII has delivered over 80% accuracy in predictions of seed-to-A-round conversion rates at significant up rounds
- CII has provided over 4X better odds that its portfolio startups will raise follow-on financing at higher valuations
- With CII, women and minority founders get funded at 10X national averages
- 40% of CII-funded companies are led by women and greater than diverse founder teams lead 50%.
Recent CrowdSmart startups include: Syntiant, InvolveSoft, CocoonCam, and Lensabl.
“CrowdSmart is dramatically improving the success rate for all our partners on the CII platform,” said Fred Campbell, CEO, and co-founder of CrowdSmart. “Our partners use CII to engage their communities, startups use it to jumpstart early successes, and investors use it as a source for highly curated and scored deal flow.”
The CrowdSmart startup evaluation takes three-to-four weeks and begins when a startup is carefully matched with 20-30 specially selected CrowdSmart evaluators who engage the startup online, no matter where they are located geographically. Evaluators access all feedback and responses from the startup’s management team throughout the diligence period. Along the way, CrowdSmart uses AI and NLP to identify driving themes -- risks, concerns, benefits, and potential -- emerging from evaluators’ comments. Typical examples might be “concerns with the company’s exit strategy” or “excitement generated from product traction beta customers.” As data is collected, CII adaptively learns, organizes and maximizes the data’s predictive power. Refined data feeds into the AI engine, which continually learns from the prioritized collective opinions of the platform’s experts. Most importantly, the system establishes rank and relevance for reasons to invest, pass or wait.
“CrowdSmart gave us predictive data that was transparent and actionable,” said Gaurav Bhattachara, CEO and co-founder of InvolveSoft. “We learned exactly what we had to do to make us attractive to investors and improve our likelihood of market success.“
“By combining world-class human and artificial intelligence technology with a global community of experts, we’ve created a system that has the potential to make venture capital investing fast and fair,” said Kim Polese, Chairman at CrowdSmart. “This transformation is already enabling our goal to dramatically expand access to capital and funding for the most promising entrepreneurs everywhere while improving success rates of startups and investors.”
For more information on CII visit CrowdSmart
Join the CrowdSmart Community on LinkedIn
Follow CrowdSmart on Twitter at @CrowdsmartIO
About CrowdSmart
CrowdSmart is a pioneer in the application of prediction science to startup investing. With greater than 80% prediction accuracy over the last four years, CrowdSmart’s proprietary algorithm combines world-class artificial intelligence and a global community of member evaluators to fill the data gap in the seed investing ecosystem. CrowdSmart is democratizing startup investing by expanding the flow of capital to the most promising early-stage startups and increasing the return on investment (ROI) for both investors and entrepreneurs with our Collective Intelligent Investing (CII) platform. CrowdSmart partners get access to this highly curated diligence network and scored deal flow. Based in San Francisco, the company was founded in 2015 by seasoned entrepreneurs Fred Campbell, Thomas Kehler PhD, Markus Guehrs, and Kim Polese.
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