The Jeff Pulver Blog: Discovering Oil in Tel Aviv

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June 02, 2008

Discovering Oil in Tel Aviv

During the past twelve months I have met with over two hundred and fifty different early-stage startups in Tel Aviv during my visits to Israel. I have met with some pretty amazing and inspiring people from companies poised to make an impact in a wide range of industry sectors including: Communications, Media/Entertainment, Energy, Computing, Advertising, Fashion and more. I believe that some of the people I have gotten to know will emerge as leaders in their respective industry sectors in the months and years ahead. A few already have. And after meeting with these companies, I have made a number of investments in mostly what can be best described as “stealth mode” opportunities. And this is something I’m planning on continuing to do for the foreseeable future.

In some way it feels like I’m prospecting for Oil in Tel Aviv. And every once in a while after meeting a company, it feels like I may have found it. Such is the case with a company I met last month called BrainDamage. When they first contacted me, because of their name, I thought they were a Rock Band. After meeting with them and learning about their technology, it turns out what they are working on is a technology that could rock the internet. Their pitch? They built a computer that understands context. In their words what they built was “....a Natural Thinking Technology that replicates human thinking on computers. It works exactly like human brain.” Their tag line? “We are bringing computers to life.” When I heard this my mind jumped to the vision of Skynet from the Terminator movies. Could this be another case of Science Fiction becoming real Science?

While I’m not a subject matter expert in the world of Natural Language Programing, I did appreciate what they were developing and the large scale impact they could have in just the areas of internet search and discovery let alone academic research and computing in general. If it turns out that BrainDamage’s technology lives up to the claims of their team, the potential exists that I met with the core team of people who are responsible for taking a science fiction concept and delivering the real-world science behind it. And I think this is pretty cool...and bigger than any of the other real-life rock stars that I’ve ever met.

So I asked BrainDamage to put in their own words what exactly they have done and this is what they had to say.
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‘Our machine (computer) is learning by itself and understanding the meaning with no human intervention. Sounds impossible? Well we’ve done it and it works!!!!

The technology, just like the human brain, builds its "Fingerprint" that leads to thousands of different ways humans comprehend and express a particular idea. After automatic review and analysis of its information sources, Noesis assembles the results most closely matching to the true meaning of the original query.

Our Dream Sequence technology is studying and learning automatically ideas and concepts it feels “he” doesn’t yet understands fully.

The first wave of targeted customers for BrainDamage are the companies providing / developing search engines. Today’s search is fundamentally counterintuitive. The more descriptive words you use, the fewer accurate matches you actually get.” And their platform provides the exact opposite. It locates information by understanding the underlying “actual” meaning within its context. ‘

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As things turned out, I almost did not meet with the BrainDamage team. This is because this is a company that is looking to raise millions of dollars and that isn’t exactly the typical profile of the kind of early-stage startup that I look to meet with. While I do hope to spend more time with BrainDamage in the near future, it will be up to someone else to be responsible to discover their magic and for funding their business and fueling their dreams. But I did enjoy meeting with their team for dinner in the Port of Tel Aviv a couple of weeks ago and the conversations that we had. These are pretty amazing people. So I thank Danny Fine for his persistence in setting up our initial meeting.

I’ll leave it to others who follow Natural Language Programming to discover BrainDamage and learn about the work that they are doing. And I can only hope that they will meet with the right strategic investors who will have an open mind and who will end up providing the capital they need in order to deliver on the underlying vision behind the company.

And after meeting with 250+ companies, it is nice to discover oil every once in a while. :)

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Readers of my blog are invited to join me on both twitter and Facebook.

Tags: Tel Aviv, BrainDamage, Israel, NLP, Jeff Pulver

Posted by jeff on June 2, 2008 07:39 AM | Permalink

Additional resources: #140conf events | Watch the Jeff Pulver Show | Jeff's Qik Videos

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Posted by: injection molding at June 16, 2009 10:02 AM

I don't believe Twine.com and BrainDamage make for a fair comparison.

My focus on "early" early-stage startups.

Posted by: Jeff Pulver at June 3, 2008 08:40 AM

Thanks Jeff,

Brain damage sounds like a little like Twine.com but, I could be way off here. Twine is more for networking and Brain Damage sounds like more of a universal software solution?

May I ask, what are you most interested in investing in? besides oil ;)

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June 02, 2008

Discovering Oil in Tel Aviv

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