Breaking back into Richmond’s entrepreneurial scene, computer scientist David Der is seeking to expand machine learning technology across industries with his newest project, Forestry ML.
Der spent two years at the Capital One Center for Machine Learning after they acquired his last startup, Notch, in 2018. Earlier this year, with a desire to get back into the entrepreneurship game, he left Capital One to launch Forestry ML, an AI and machine learning consulting company also based in Richmond.
Forestry ML, which launched three months ago, focuses on two types of engagement with customers: strategic and tactical.
“We help with roadmaps and strategy, but on a technical level we are implementers and engineers ourselves,” Der said. “Our services are fully soup to nuts, you could say.”
Strategic partnerships generally include a long-term relationship where clients that don’t have machine learning experience are helped through the process of breaking into this kind of technology, Der said.
Tactical engagements usually tackle a company's specific problem; in these cases Forestry is hired to implement a machine learning model to solve that problem.
Der did not disclose how much funding the company received, he said he was an initial investor, along with Brian Forrester, one of the co-founders and owners of Workshop Digital. The majority of their funding, however, came Richmond-based advisory firm Consult360.
The team plans to target clients in financial services, healthcare and digital marketing throughout the Mid-Atlantic region, but Der said their services could be applied to virtually any industry.
“We take on national customers as well, we're just trying to focus our business development efforts a little,” he added. “That still gives us a pretty large swatch to go after.”
Der said he thinks the company has finally begun carving out its niche in the industry.
“One area that we are attacking with financial services, specifically, is data quality and anomaly detection,” he said. “We've built an early phase of a product in that space, as well, that we just pitched to a bunch of VCs in New York City."
Recently, Der gave a presentation using anomaly detection to track sentiment and public opinion about Covid-19.
Hew said this was done "through news coverage using natural language processing techniques to mine data and insights out of news headlines and stories.”
