Venture Lab’s Breakthrough: Introducing Nexa, An AI Companion For The Elderly
As tech start-ups increasingly take center stage at IE Venture Day, a team of students from IE School of Science and Technology stood out from the competition with a project that won the Best Sci-Tech School Startup called Nexa, a supportive and empathetic conversational AI companion designed for the elderly.
In a fierce battle of innovation, where 10 finalists made the cut from the more than 150 teams that participated in this round of Venture Lab, a trio from the Master in Business Analytics and Big Data claimed the title of the best team from the SciTech School.
mAIbook, an artificial intelligence tool that allows users to create unique books for their children based on their individual needs and that puts them at the center of the story took home the top prize at the Venture Day final.
IE Venture Day Madrid is an annual event that rewards the best entrepreneurial projects created by the IE University student and alumni community and is decided by a jury composed of international entrepreneurs and investors. This event fosters the entrepreneurship ecosystem and is a meeting point for startups, investors, companies, accelerators and thought leaders, as well as for the winners of the Venture Lab acceleration program.
Tristan Joslin, Alessandro Neri, and Lorenz Pichler said Nexa is engineered to be engaging and enjoyable to use. Its conversational capabilities transcend time, allowing it to discuss any topic, no matter how recent. What sets Nexa apart is its remarkable memory, which retains every conversation with each user. This feature enables Nexa to continuously enhance its abilities as a companion and conversation partner, making it a reliable and evolving presence in users' lives.
The team also landed a startup grant from Amazon Web Services.
While the team praised Venture Lab for giving them the opportunity to bring their idea to life they said their inspiration for Nexa stemmed from a deeply personal place.
“All three of us have older family members who are getting older and feeling lonelier as time goes on. We have seen first-hand the negative effects of loneliness in the elderly when it comes to both physical health and mental well-being. As the global population continues to age and deal with the challenges of loneliness and isolation at an increasing rate, we recognize the necessity for an effective, round-the-clock solution,” said Joslin.
Moreover, Neri applauded the Sci-Tech School's commitment to equipping students with practical skills by pointing out that “without the general knowledge of AI and NLP that we were exposed to during this master’s degree, we would have never come up with the idea for Nexa in the first place.”
He said the significance of the technical skills they acquired during their degree program were crucial in propelling Nexa beyond the ideation phase and enabled them to develop a fully functional MVP.
For the winning trio, the Venture Lab experience was an opportunity to attend multiple workshops in a wide range of subjects designed to get start-ups off the ground, in addition to one-on-one mentorship sessions from successful entrepreneurs.
“Participating in the Venture Lab allowed us to gauge the feasibility of our idea from a business perspective, which led to us pivoting it more than once,” said Joslin.