It's not only startup founders who are finding new ways to enhance their products using artificial intelligence, but their investors as well.
Chicago-based venture capital firm Portal Innovations was founded in 2020 to address a perceived need for the city to leverage the potential of its biotechnology research. Now it's adding artificial intelligence and machine learning to further that mission and expand to other areas of the country and into new fields.
Portal Innovations kicked off the year with the launch of Stargaze, an AI-driven tool that aims to help gather millions of datapoints from grants, papers, funding documents and more to better predict biotech hotbeds — both in terms of geography and in areas like drug development — and find the next great innovation and innovators.
"I think that right now we have the next big biotech startup that's going to be on the front page of every newspaper in the future here in Chicago — I just couldn't tell you which one it is yet," Steve Lehmann, senior director of venture at Portal Innovations, told Chicago Inno.
Lehmann thinks Stargaze could help with that.
"Anybody can identify who the key inventors are in the Chicago ecosystem," he said. "When we first developed Stargaze, the goal was to do that in geographies where we don't have a decade of personal relationships. We tested it in Chicago and it showed me everybody I already know. But it also showed me other people I didn't know, and that's really exciting for us."
Lehmann said the tool will help them identify who the "under-the-radar" researchers are, to help find, for example, the next Bob Langer, a well-known entrepreneur out of MIT, but for Chicago and other areas of the country.
"There's a VC fund called Polaris. They spotted Bob first and they've commercialized like 15 inventions with 15 companies with him, one of which was Moderna," Lehmann said. "I want to do that in every market and be the one spotting the Bob Langers first. That's what Stargaze is about."
Portal Innovations opened new offices in Boston and Houston in 2023, and Lehmann said the company is exploring and anticipating expanding into additional new cities in the near future.
