We have personally known the leadership of Verdant (Brian Dolan) for quite a while, so are totally biased, but rest assured that bias is based on years of interactions where whenever Brian says he will do something he does. Verdant is a startup studio that is focusing on speeding the time to market of enterprise grade AI solutions. Verdant AI is an innovation lab and startup studio that advances technological breakthroughs in AI. Leveraging our core competencies in the key areas of engineering design, AI application development, and analytic product-market fit means we can accelerate time to market and time to value of AI-driven products. As a growing field, the demand for AI expertise and associated technologies has also caught fire.

As the startup market has matured over the years, so too have the models for company acceleration and growth. New industries have unfolded to nurture seedling companies and develop them from conception through to launch and eventual exit. These models include accelerators, incubators, VCs, angels, and now the startup studio model is unfolding as a new approach to accelerating innovation. Accelerators for startups come in all flavors from broad-stroke cohorts such as Techstars or 500 Startups to more niche accelerators focusing on specific verticals such as IndieBio. After a competitive application process, accelerators will select a cohort of startup teams (ranging from 10-20).

I'm thrilled to share that I've joined All Turtles! We partner with entrepreneurs to build products that use AI to solve everyday problems. Led by CEO Phil Libin and co-founders Jessica Collier and Jon Cifuentes, All Turtles is an AI startup studio pioneering a new model for entrepreneurship. As Phil has written, the traditional Silicon Valley methods for innovation and company formation are ill-suited to the development of practical AI. AI provides fundamentally more simple, more powerful, and more personal ways for people to interact with technology.

AI is one of the buzzwords of the moment in the world of tech, with startups coming at the concept from all angles -- computer vision, machine learning, unstructured data inference and natural language processing being just a handful -- in a wider effort to create more intelligent machines. Now comes a new organization that hopes to find and foster the next wave of AI businesses and products, co-founded by the ex-CEO of Evernote, Phil Libin (pictured above), who has left his role as a managing director at General Catalyst to build it (but he tells me he'll stay on as an advisor). All Turtles, as the new company is called, is not your traditional startup incubator. In an interview with TechCrunch earlier, Libin (whose other co-founders are Jessica Collier (Product Design) and Jon Cifuentes (Research and Operations) described it as "startup studio", more akin to Netflix's push to develop original content than to 500 Startups. It will start out with locations in San Francisco, Tokyo and Paris.

SAP, the 23.3 billion market leader in Enterprise application software has upped its game in India, by bringing into its campus in Whitefield, Bengaluru, the first batch of startups that are working on core technologies like artificial intelligence and cloud-based software. The new tenants at SAP Labs India campus will be housed at the "StartUp Studio" – a 75 seat incubation facility. Every year, the studio will take around 10 startups, provide them with technical expertise and support and give them access to the large base of SAP customers where appropriate. . The end goal of the Studio is to fine-tune the business of these startups and take them to their next stage of growth. "Startup innovations are happening in India and we recognise that we have to support the Startup Policy launched by the Prime Minister this year," says Bernd Leukert, Member of the Executive Board at SAP, Products and Innovation.