Targeting big impact deep tech
In part two we continue William Tunstall-Pedoe’s journey. William discusses his exit from Amazon, his involvement with Toronto based incubator, Creative Destructive Lab and what drove him to be a successful invested investor with over 50 investments with Cambridge Angels and Octopus Investments. He offers us an insight into his passion for big impact, deep tech, in particular, an AI physician app, where he acts as an invested investor and adviser. In this episode we also bring you an Amazon Alexa demonstration carried out by William, we hope you find it as highly entertaining as we do. You can hear more by listening to his podcast …
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William Tunstall-Pedoe is a British entrepreneur focused Artificial Intelligence and other deep technology. He is based in Cambridge, UK and London but also frequently in Toronto and both coasts of the US. (LinkedIn)
His biggest recent achievement was founding the British company Evi (formerly True Knowledge) in 2005. After seven years running the business as a venture capital backed start-up, Amazon acquired it in 2012 and its AI technology, platform and team were used to create Alexa. For more than three years he had a senior role in the team that defined, built and launched Amazon Alexa and the Amazon Echo product (the initial Alexa device). Evi is now a subsidiary of Amazon and a large development centre employing many hundreds of scientists and engineers.
After a decade since founding the company and with everything he hoped to achieve delivered successfully, he made the difficult decision to leave Amazon in February 2016.
William now spends much of his time helping and investing in other AI startups. He has personally invested in more than 60 such businesses (see his angellist profile.) . He is a full member of Cambridge Angels and a fellow of the Creative Destruction Lab in Toronto. He is also thinking gently about what to do next – which will likely be founding another AI-based startup.
Produced by Mark Cotton, Twitter.
Podcast links:
Evi Technologies - knowledge base and semantic search engine software (article by WIRED magazine)
Amazon Alexa - a virtual assistant developed by Amazon, first used in Amazon Echo and the Amazon Echo Dot smart speakers developed by Amazon Lab126