#StartupsEverywhere profile: Gordon McDonald, Founder and CEO, Capice
This profile is part of #StartupsEverywhere, an ongoing series highlighting startup leaders in ecosystems across the country. This interview has been edited for length, content, and clarity.
Using Deep Learning to Help Small Businesses (and Combat COVID-19)
Capice, a Florida-based AI startup that uses deep learning to analyze data, is helping companies of all sizes quickly generate predictive outcomes from a variety of sources—including audio, image, spreadsheets, and text. But the startup also recently announced that it is offering medical researchers free access to its deep learning network to help combat the spread of COVID-19. We recently spoke with Capice’s CEO, Gordon McDonald, to learn more about how the startup’s deep learning platform works, and the firm’s decision to open up its platform to coronavirus researchers.
Tell us a little about yourself. What is your background?
My background is in artificial intelligence. I’ve been in AI and studying it since 1983—almost my entire career. I went to the University of Michigan and have a computer engineering background, and I worked for ophthalmologists in California on disease detection and glaucoma. A staffer who was a PhD from Harvard told me to read this book about artificial intelligence. My background was in software, but ever since that point I’ve been watching it and tracking it.
I’ve spent almost 40 years now in technology and AI. I’ve done IT for a variety of companies, from infrastructure to software to enterprise app development. But I was always in a hands-on position, which has really come into play with this company.
Deep learning has been around for years, but it hasn’t really become effective, in my view, until the last decade. Over the last 8 years or so, it has really come forward, because there’s more computer power out there, there’s more memory power out there, and the algorithms used in deep learning finally turned a few corners and became effective.
But, there was still a void: resources were expensive and hard to find. Creating centers of excellence is both expensive and time-consuming. This applies to companies both large and small. What everyone wants is the “result” of deep learning classification and prediction without all the time and effort to staff up for it.
So I finally decided to put all of this experience into play since I knew the subject matter so well and wanted to fill the void.
Tell us more about Capice. What is the work you’re doing, and how are you making deep learning accessible to companies of all sizes?
Deep learning doesn’t require you to necessarily write any algorithm. You have a deep learning neural network, you drop in data, and it generates the algorithm. It’s beautiful.
What I saw was this void. If you wanted to have deep learning built into your software platform, or have deep learning built into your business, well, good luck doing that. That’s an onerous task to get involved in. You have to have the budget, you have to go hire these resources to create these deep learning or, worse yet, machine learning models, and then you have to spend the time developing it. Then you have to move it through development environments and production environments and you’re probably about a year out once you get through all the phases.
What if I want to do this tomorrow? Or in the next 5 minutes ? Well, what this platform enables you to do is to get it done immediately. It is 100% Web and API based. No software installations or software downloads needed. All you do is provide data. As one example, users have trained COVID-19 cases soup to nuts in 6 minutes.
Plus, if you desire, your deep learning neural network models can optionally be ‘published’ for world wide use instantly.
You can create a highly accurate deep learning model on HR data, and determine, for example, who’s going to leave the company in six months. I can train that model for your company in about 10 seconds, and I can go run that model on your entire company and give you a spreadsheet on all of your data, and run that in about another 10 seconds. In less than two minutes, I can have the entire deep learning model trained and running. You can get your answer that fast without needing to spend a lot of money or build your own platform for a cost-affordable and quick turnaround.
The price points are very low, because I wanted to be sure that small businesses can use this. Budgets are too tight for many small businesses to do this on their own. So it’s designed to make sure that small and large businesses alike can roll in and start using this platform the same day, and can then build it into their projects.
What are you doing to address the COVID-19 pandemic?
The White House had a formal call to action on artificial intelligence to solve the coronavirus pandemic and I thought it was a great idea.
We’re enabling our platform to be used for free by coronavirus researchers for anything they’re doing. I read the call and thought that this is a chance to help solve a bigger problem, and if they need it and I’ve got it—and it’s easy to use—then they can have it for free. So we’ve announced that our platform is open to researchers working on combating the virus, and now we’re trying to spread the word about the service so they can use it.
What’s the most exciting or important development that has happened in the last few years when it comes to developing deep learning models?
Years ago, this was relegated to laboratories and universities and think tanks. The most exciting development I see is that it can now be used for businesses. The reason we built this platform—and it’s simple to use by just dragging and dropping data without needing to create an algorithm—is that there are other ways to create deep learning.
There were other methods companies could implement deep learning, but they would have to hire developers and technicians and get all of the data. There was no platform this easy to use. Everything out there was for serious developers. So our platform allows people and companies to easily drag and drop data to create an outcome in two minutes.
It’s also doing some interesting stuff with medical and clinical research now. There’s an interesting use case with a company that makes hip placements and wants to predict the pain levels of people after their surgery. They want to input all of this various data to predict the pain level, but there’s no algorithm they know of to do this.
So we took their data and put it through this deep learning model and figured it out, and it’s highly accurate. I was blown away, because it could predict pain and quality of life moving forward.
Are there any startup-related policy issues that you believe should receive more attention from state and federal lawmakers?
We are self funded, and access to venture capital happens when you have around $1 to $2 million in sales. Companies see that and you can grab their interest. So you have to go from zero to $1 million or $2 million, and self funding it can be difficult. You have to write your own checks, and your expenses are going down fast.
It would be great if the government could supply a different form of VC to help companies through that zero to $1 million hurdle. It’s a hard hurdle. It’s hard to wake up in the morning with zero when you’re trying to get people to buy the product and do demos. If you’re selling to a large company, the sales cycle there is 12 months, maybe even 18 months. That’s before they buy. If you’re selling a product that appeals to their market segment, you’ve got a long time to get through before the big dollars roll in.
If there were a pool of money that could be tapped into for companies in that gestation period, that would be a huge help. I’m not talking about free money, because there would need to be some rules and regulations around it. Startups have an incubation stage where you’re not making sales, though, and if there’s a backboard in that phase you could tap into—even in a minimalistic way to do an advertising campaign—it would be a big help.
What is your goal for Capice moving forward?
My goal since day one has been to get everyone to use this product and have deep learning capabilities built into their businesses. I’ve loved this stuff for 40 years, but it hasn’t always been used the way it could be.
So I want everyone to benefit from this platform—from the local bakeshop to large companies. American businesses need this for a leg up, and I want businesses and universities across the country to use this product to better their outcomes. And if I make a few bucks along the way, that’s all the better.
All of the information in this profile was accurate at the date and time of publication.
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