A veteran group of Nashville technology sector officials announced Tuesday the launch of The Innovation Studio with the goal of building startups working on artificial intelligence products.
Brian Moyer
Founders and directors include Brian Moyer, former CEO of the Greater Technology Council; Tim Estes, founder and former CEO of Nashville tech company Digital Reasoning; Peter Rousos, director of new venture development for the Vanderbilt University Center for Technology Transfer & Commercialization; Matt DiMaria, former CEO at Mindful and CEO-in-residence at Alpine Investors; and Lerry Wilson, senior director at Splunk.
According to a release, The Innovation Studio will be a venture studio like those that started emerging in the early 2000s as “a better way to start and grow successful companies.” Rather than working with existing companies that need investment, like a venture capital fund, the venture studio aims to find holes in the market and fund new startups that meet those needs. The venture studio will be involved in hiring a CEO for the startup and remain hands-on until the company is sold, differentiating the venture studio from accelerators that offer investment and support in the short-term.
The Innovation Studio has offices at the Franklin Innovation Center. Moyer told the Nashville Business Journal that the founders are working on raising $10 million to seed the effort.
Estes said in the release that the goal is to focus on “industrial AI,” as opposed to the generative AI seen in popular tools like ChatGPT. Industrial AI, focused on applications in specific industries, “holds much greater potential for commercial success, as it can result in significant improvements in a business’ efficiency, quality control, profitability and more,” he added.
Moyer said the studio will partner with local educational institutions like Vanderbilt, Belmont University and Meharry Medical College.
“The Innovation Studio leverages Nashville’s growing technology ecosystem, the founders’ global network, and Nashville’s academic community to identify and solve enterprise scale problems that demand much deeper applications of AI than what off-the-shelf consumer-grade tools can provide,” Moyer said in the release. “The kinds of Industrial AI solutions we are building require trusted business relationships, access to proprietary data, and iterative problem-solving methodologies in close communication with our industry partners.
"At present, retail, financial, manufacturing and automotive markets appear to hold the greatest promise, but we will remain sector agnostic and stay alert to opportunities across the board.”