2019 Disruptive Technology Trends: Actionable Discoveries and New Enterprise Creation

In pursuit of the regular write-up on various blogs, research and academic publications, providing thought leadership opinions to business and technology reviews and marketplace on trending technology disruption that we see across the industry, every year I explore and deep dive to bring up the latest trends in technology innovation and their impact to business and people. These insights are heavily sourcing out from the VLAB’s seasonal contents and my personal views in quest of bringing up the proximity view from VC lens, founder’s vision and industry thought leadership acumen. Various data points, predictions and prospective are vetted through deep research, validations and discovery calls ran by incredible and passionate people supporting innovation, disruption and emerging technologies. I have been focused on this journey for last seven years through VLAB, one of the largest and oldest forum in Silicon Valley founded at Stanford, which connects Entrepreneurs, Venture Capitalist and Thought Leaders in Silicon Valley. I will be closely following the identified technologies, companies and investments for the next 12 months and their implication to industry, business and people. Finally, all the views and posts are my own and few are bolstered by VLAB contents.

Zero-Trust Cybersecurity

Zero-trust security intended to become slowly into a mainstream. End –to-End Security starting from users, devices, networks and applications are the digital ecosystem demands today across industry which are becoming a challenging to protect as security should travel with data in a secured infrastructure and environment. Zero Trust is the solution in which every request is independently authenticated, authorized, and encrypted based on what is known about the users, their device and the application that are attempting to access. As the enterprise perimeter dissolves, cybersecurity today must extend beyond simply protecting on-premises data. The cost of failing to do so is potentially huge. According to a recent study sponsored by IBM, the average cost of a single data breach is over $3 million.

There will be evolving solutions around micro-segmentation and software-defined perimeters to fill these opportunities and gaps.

Few Insights:

In 2010, Forrester branded the concept of a Zero Trust network

In 2014, Google implemented it as the BeyondCorp security approach

In 2017, Gartner framed it as Continue Adaptive Risk and Trust Assessment (CARTA)

Some of the early and established startups working on this technology include Aporeto, Illumio, Exabeam, Anomali, CloudPassage and Skybox.

Quantum Computing

Quantum computing promises to overturn everything and create the most fundamental change in the history of computing. Processing power has been increased and need of speed to enable new competencies mandates optimum time or outside the scope of current classing computing systems. With so much hype, from drug development and financial modeling to weather forecasting and AI/ML, quantum computing epitomizes the greatest innovation in years to come. The hardest hit seems to be in cryptography with capability to instantly breaking today’s strongest data encryption algorithms in the other hand, impact will be exponential in major government’s services, multinational corporation’s solutions and a growing number of startups around the globe solving the pressing problems of industry and world.

Some of the early and established startups working on this technology include Bleximo, SecureRF, Atom Computing and 1Qbit.

Open-Source Processors

Intel and ARM are the predominant processor choices, both operate a closed ecosystem whereby they are the only ones updating the processor architecture or allow changes for a steep price (architectural license in case of ARM). RISC V is the latest approach in open source processor design and is to processors what Linux was to Operating Systems. For years, open-source has lived exclusively in the software domain. From Linux to GitHub, open-source software has become a powerful way to bring new products and solutions to market. This open-source transformation in software is now making its way to silicon, with far-reaching implications.

Companies like SiFive and Esperanto are already commercializing new architectures based on the open-source approach, and new open-source communities like the RISC V consortium are having a huge impact.

Advance Deep Learning and the Rise of AI

A new wave of technologies will disrupt the de facto monopoly on deep learning held by the owners of massive data. The first deep learning and machine learning applications required huge amounts of data (images, cameras, Lidars, voice recordings, sensors, web data). With LIME and Attention Mechanism, GAN and other allow technologies developers can address text classifications, summarizations, enterprise workflows, manufacturing processes, fashion and art design processes etc.

New opportunities are created embedding AI/ML in manufacturing, sales and customer interactions, employee productivity, robotic process automation to name a few. Because of expected mass adoptions across many verticals, revenues from Applied AI technologies is expected to be in the excess of $59B by 2025.

Adoptions of AI is always come-up with job loss, loss of privacy, lack of trained work force, data ownership, retraining of workforce etc. It is also possible that governmental regulations, protections will also come into (See what is happening with Tarrif etc. in recent times). Many of these issues are now being addressed by industry, it will be incumbent on players offering solutions to be keep up and be current.

There are growing number of AI and ML companies out there, but some of the early and established startups including incumbent driving this technology.

Loop AI Labs | H20.AI |Facebook AI Research (FAIR)

Robotic Agility

Robots are augmenting helping hands from warehouse fulfillment to manufacturing and surgical operations. Automation has also entered many steps of order fulfillment. The next step to be disrupted is the laborious picking and manipulation of goods, resizing human operators with better precision, accuracy and efficiency. The latest advancement in robotic technologies have the potential to transform the entire industries by combining cloud computing and machine learning with novel gripper design. This has led to the fundamental questions around emerging business opportunities, threats to human workforces and its overall implication to society.

Some of the novel companies as Grabit, Knightscope etc.

Blockchain and Token Economy

Even the most seasoned investors, entrepreneurs, and established businesses have been caught off guard by the meteoric rise of Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) to STO now IEO, cryptographic tokens, and blockchain-based application development. Early-stage startups raised billions of dollars from ICOs during the year 2017, far outstripping venture and angel funding. Public and enterprise blockchain went on bifurcated development across industry as technology evolve around s-curve. Blockchain is already a potential technological and economic disruption not seen since the birth of the worldwide web: the decentralization of the Internet. As the market gets to the mature stage, decentralization of data storage and ownership promises to dramatically upend the status quo, cutting out intermediaries and centralized platforms and replacing them with token-based, peer-to-peer transactions executed via “smart contracts.” Myriad service industries are in blockchain’s crosshairs, from financial and payment processing to ride and home sharing, such as Uber and Airbnb.

AR/VR: Mix Reality

Augmented Reality (AR) has been one of the hottest and most-discussed technologies over the last decade. Many experts are predicting an AR boom in the next 5 years over a wide range of applications, including entertainment, education, manufacturing, healthcare, retail, and travel, among others. Of these many potential uses, outdoor AR is an emerging sector that opens up new possibilities for location-based services. Adding a new digital layer on top of the existing world, outdoor AR will forever change the way we interact with information and open up new ways to transform our surrounding environment. The only limits are our imagination. While the potential for outdoor AR is huge, it requires new infrastructure. Both startups such as 6D.ai and Ubiquity6, and big corporations like Google are racing to develop new mapping techniques to position graphics in the real world.

Breakthroughs in Diabetes

It has been estimated that more than 1.5 million people in the United States live with Type 1 diabetes, a disease in which the pancreas does not produce enough insulin. Yes, the industry has come a long way from the room-sized artificial pancreas of the 70s, paper records, finger pricking, and manual injections.

With today’s continuous glucose monitoring systems and self-optimizing insulin pumps — and improved software that connects the two — the search for the artificial pancreas may be close to over. And it’s not just big companies and startups that are having an impact. Feeling that progress still seems slow, some patients are taking matters into their own hands and creating their own artificial pancreas. Wherever these new solutions come from Bigfoot Biomedical, ViaCyte and Abbott, they will have the power to transform millions of lives.

Impact of Technology on Clinical Trials

Bringing a new medical treatment or drug to market often takes years and costs billions of dollars, and clinical trials usually present the biggest sinkhole — by some estimates, up to 20% of a $65B industry. As medical expenses skyrocket, several startups such as Deep 6 AI and Medable are working on AI and other emerging technologies aim to revolutionize or, in some cases, even replace the clinical trial process.

These new technologies promise to get the right cure to the right people at the right time, simply because they decrease the time to market and expenses involved in clinical trials — while also reducing the frustration that so many patients feel about their treatment options.

Fully Autonomous Vehicles

The automotive industry is bracing for a new surge of progress and opportunity, with billions of dollars on the line. The potential is huge. People have been dreaming about owning a self-driving car for decades, and recent sales have shown that consumers are willing to spend big bucks for this dream.

The final push to widespread availability of fully autonomous vehicles has begun. Testing has moved onto public roads, and in the next few years, several vendors plan to release autonomous vehicles in limited-use “Level 4” situations (taxis, transit companies, fleet operations, freeway-only driving). As the technology advances from “assisted driving” to true self-driving, consumer-ready vehicles for general road travel (Level 5) will be tailgating right behind. Industry-leading startups, entrepreneurs, and investors will explore the technologies and challenges related to realizing the dream of a fully autonomous self-driving vehicle — i.e. a vehicle that a human does not need to monitor and that can completely take over all driving responsibilities.