Toronto-based venture studio AXL is adding nine senior scientists from organizations like Nvidia, Samsung, and even NASA to mentor its startups as they scale from pilots to real-world deployment.
The nine additions, all professors at the University of Toronto, join AXL as part of its inaugural cohort of Faculty Fellows, a program meant to bring decades of industry and academic expertise to the ventures emerging from the studio and its corporate partners.
Some of the inaugural fellows include Nvidia senior director of AI software (and CentML co-founder) Gennady Pekhimenko, former NASA lead scientist Steve Easterbrook, former Intel Labs research scientist Nandita Vijaykumar, and Sven Dickinson, the former lead of Samsung Toronto’s AI Research Centre.
In an interview with BetaKit on Friday, Wigdor said the Faculty Fellows program is “selectively rounding up” professors who are academically brilliant and know how to turn technology into something “useful.”
“These are all people who have real experience translating research into successful products and real outcomes to real people,” Wigdor said, adding that they work at the world’s biggest companies and most important institutions, so they “have their finger on the pulse of what is going on in industry.”
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As a venture studio, AXL identifies business problems, consults academic research, and then assigns entrepreneurs to solve the problem with AI. Some of these problems are raised by AXL’s corporate partners, who work with the venture studio to solve them. Wigdor has committed to launching 50 AI companies over the next five years through AXL in an effort to slow Canada’s brain drain. In the interview, he told BetaKit that AXL has approved a total of nine investments to date, and is on pace to meet its five-year goal.
AXL’s inaugural fellows have committed to providing the venture studio with a certain number of hours every month, where they’ll spend time working with AXL’s corporate partners on identifying their problems and how to solve them.
“We’re starting first with real customer need through the corporate partner, and then we bring in these brilliant people who have a deep knowledge of all the research that might otherwise take years to make its way out into the world,” Wigdor said. “Then we create a startup around it.”
Faculty Fellows can either co-found companies in the studio or sit on their advisory boards. They are locked in for two-year terms.
“That way, we always make sure we’re on the cutting edge,” Wigdor said.
Just like everyone else at the venture studio, the Faculty Fellows are compensated with units in the AXL limited partnership, or “sweat equity,” Wigdor explained. They effectively own shares in every company the studio creates, as if they had invested cash in a venture fund.
“It’s because we’re creating an environment where we’re not competitive with each other internally, but we’re genuinely building on each other’s success and helping each other,” Wigdor said. For the Faculty Fellows, “everything they touch and make better, they are benefiting from financially,” he added.
A full list of AXL’s inaugural Faculty Fellows cohort is below:
- Alec Jacobson, senior research scientist at Adobe and associate professor at U of T’s Department of Computer Science.
- Alex Mariakakis, assistant professor at U of T’s Department of Computer Science and the lead for the Computational Health and Interaction (CHAI) Lab.
- David Lindell, assistant professor at U of T’s Department of Computer Science.
- Gennady Pekhimenko, senior director of AI Software at NVIDIA, former researcher at Microsoft, faculty member at the Vector Institute, and assistant professor at U of T’s Department of Computer Science.
- Michael Brudno, chief data scientist at the University Health Network and professor at at U of T’s Department of Computer Science.
- Nandita Vijaykumar, former research scientist at Intel Labs, former design engineer at AMD, and assistant professor at U of T’s Department of Computer Science.
- Sven Dickinson, former lead of Samsung Toronto’s AI Research Centre and professor at U of T’s Department of Computer Science.
- Steve Easterbrook, former lead scientist at NASA and professor at U of T.
- Steve Engels, professor at U of T’s Department of Computer Science.
With files from Josh Scott.
Feature image courtesy AXL.