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At hackathons, in conference halls, in the pavilions of learning, and across the wide internet, developers and engineers are competing for attention. And funding. It’s a great time to be making stuff. As AI revolutionizes all industries, people are paying attention to the wizards who are the front-runners in handling this amazing new power, and making LLMs dance.
This year at Imagination in Action in Silicon Valley, 45 innovations vied for the coveted title of most awesome tools. I kid, but not really. These three projects won the day. Godela and Oligo will share 25k and Bioreact will earn 10k – and all three will receive up to $350K in cloud credits from for Startups and access to NVIDIA’s Inception Program for startups. The 60k in in prize dollars is a grant with no equity from Mayfield.
Let’s learn a little more about these standouts.
Godela is a tool that provides vibrant and visual results for simulations. If, like some top analysts who I have interviewed, you see AI and simulations as the two pillars of discovery, this will be attractive to you, and it’s a popular platform for exploring an LLM’s capability to understand physics.
With Godela, users can explore data relationships, run simulated “what-if” scenarios, and generate new discoveries. Each of these tasks works on its own basis, and tools inside of the platform keep everything transparent.
A demo video from Mafruh Faruqi shows Godela at work on the simulation of a car, with designations like surface pressure, air pressure, drag and wind in play. Faruqi shows how users can select components, model movement, and put simulations to the test, with valuable context built into models.
This is important partly because physics has been, in the past, AI’s Achilles heel. LLMs were not up on how physics affects the movement of physical objects. But now, it’s getting there.
And then there’s Oligo – a lightweight AI inference engine designed to run large language models more efficiently. It focuses on optimizing performance, reducing memory usage, and enabling scalable deployment of models across devices, servers, and cloud environments.
One thing to know about Oligo is that it can handle low earth orbit, medium earth orbit and geostationary earth orbit trajectories. These different options have their own requirements in terms of planning. Here’s how they typically trade off. LEO is fast, close, low-latency, but has relatively small coverage. MEO is mid-range, good for navigation and global constellations, ex. some kinds of satellite projects. GEO is high altitude, stationary relative to Earth, and ideal for broad communications.
Oligo’s people introduce the term “software defined design and manufacturing” to talk about developing solutions at NASA standards, more quickly than ever was possible before. With in-house hosting of workflows, automation of satellite standards research, and a range of important visual dashboards, Oligo makes the user the captain of deep space pioneering and design.
BioReact is “AI software for bioprocess scientists.” What does that mean?
First off, “bioprocess” refers to a controlled, science-based method that produces valuable products like medicines, vaccines, food ingredients, biofuels, or industrial chemicals, or brings some valuable knowledge to related fields, using living cells, enzymes, or biological systems. Scientists use upstream and downstream processing and bioreaction to perfect these types of engineering.
BioReact brings tools to the challenge, to make this work easier. Users can help mitigate the problem of siloed data, and things like scattered files, poor data handling or bad migrations. A no-code approach helps to automate some formerly labor-intensive tasks.
For example, say a team is growing cells in a lab. That’s a process with complexity – it has to be done in a controlled, consistent way. And what about the results? Having full life cycle tools for data helps make sure that professionals get what they need out of projects.
Each of these three projects has its own sway in the new world that AI has brought us. Again, people are paying attention to trail-blazing tolls in medicine, in space travel design, in process development. Let’s celebrate some of the big wins that AI has brought us this year, as we ponder what’s in store in the years to come.
