Introduction

Kordel France is the founder and CEO of Seekar Technologies, a technology startup that builds Artificial Intelligence products for a variety of industries.

Seekar, while still a startup, has put three different medical AI products through four board-reviewed clinical trials. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Seekar contributed two products free of charge to physicians to help ease demand on medical staffing and screening for the virus faster. They are currently building the first clinical AI tool used to advise neuro-psychologists in diagnosing mental disorders.

Kordel graduated from Utah State University with a Bachelor of Science degree, he received a Master of Science degree in Artificial Intelligence from John Hopkins University, and a graduate certificate in Machine Learning & AI from MIT.

Kordel’s interest began as a kid. Growing up on a farm, Kordel’s father had autonomous driving software for large tractor machinery. He remembers seeing these big machines steer themselves autonomously, which triggered a keen interest for Kordel in robotics and AI. The seeds were planted at a young age. Kordel has also always excelled in math, which played a heavy role in his future. He received his undergraduate degree in AI and computer science, which led him to a few jobs in the defense industry working as an engineer (mechanical, systems, and software engineering). Kordel had the opportunity to see many different and unique aspects of product development, just given those different engineering disciplines alone.

Fast forward to two years ago, Kordel and his colleague and co-founder, Zach, decided to fully start Seekar Technologies. Six months later, the two entrepreneurs wound up leaving their full-time jobs to pursue customers and seek revenue for Seekar. Since then, Kordel has never looked back. It’s been an exciting ride.

Startup Journey

It was a very tough decision for Kordel to leave his full-time position. He had a great job that he really enjoyed, not to mention was learning a lot under knowledgeable mentors. However, Kordel’s true passion and interest lay in AI, and the defense sector which he was working in was incredibly difficult to incorporate Artificial Intelligence into products. This is when Kordel and his co-founder decided to start their own AI company that benefited many different industries. This new vision opened opportunities to become more amenable to accepting AI into products that can augment people’s capabilities instead of necessarily replacing them.

Seekar Technologies started solely in image recognition, building image recognition systems for optics systems in hunting, shooting sports and animal conservation. . Conservation was a heavy first sector – spotting scopes for rifles and spotting in different optics such as binoculars. For example, if someone looked through binoculars or through a rifle scope and saw an endangered animal, Seekar Technologies had an active recognition on the system that said: “Do not take action because this is an endangered species, you cannot actually go after this animal.”

Seekar was able to easily bridge their technologies into other industries, such as medicine. Yet they did not have medical expertise to begin with. Kordel and his co-founder had to go out and seek advice on how to build different things for healthcare using AI. Interestingly enough, the pandemic positioned the company in a beneficial way. Seekar was able to take their image recognition technology and partner with medical experts who knew a lot more about the medical field, radiology, than Kordel and Zach did. Seekar took their image recognition platform and built a mobile application to screen for different radiology conditions in an X-ray or CT scan. Seekar’s goal was to make screening for COVID-19 easier and ease the new burden on physicians, particularly for radiologists and radiologic technicians. For example, the app allows you to either import an X-ray image or to capture an X-ray image just by taking a picture of the screen. The AI will then go through and filter out all the article glares, texts, and images and then provide feedback. The AI classifies whether the image contains signs of pneumonia, Covid-19, emphysema, or other conditions to divert people to the appropriate medical attention needed. It was a great opportunity for Seekar to bridge their image recognition technology into something highly beneficial and in demand to the world at a concerning time. It passed through a legitimate board-reviewed clinical trial and was one of the first AI products to do so in regards to the pandemic. The technology happened to be wildly successful, proving to be 95.5% as accurate as a physician in detecting Covid-19 in chest X-rays of patients. Many of Seekar’s medical prospects who were apprehensive about using “blackbox” AI before the pandemic became much more amenable to incorporating AI into medicine due to the success of this clinical trial.

Keys to Success

The COVID product made by Seekar Technologies was fully donated entirely for free to help the cause. It was also to try and make the medical field more amenable to AI solutions. The funding Seekar received up to this point was more for recreation, security, and the defense sector. This is where the money started. However, through the donated COVID app, Seekar started to see more monetary revenue from the healthcare and medicine and began to branch out into audio and different signal recognition. Transferring this technology from one sector to another was not really that difficult, especially once they had the necessary advisors to guide them on what to look for in certain images.

Seekar was founded on four principles: to make AI mobile, ethical, explainable, and dynamic.
1) A focus on mobility allows Seekar AI to remain decentralized from the cloud.
2) Ethical focus ensures its intelligence doesn’t experience the bias we see with facial recognition systems.
3) Explainability helps remove the “blackbox” state of AI so that it explains its answers just as a human can, which provides a sense of security to some users.
4) Dynamic models are able to adapt to their environment just as the human brain does.
These four principles are embedded into every product Seekar creates, regardless of the industry. These principles have garnered attention and interest in their products thus far.

Right now, Seekar Technologies is software as a service. They started out building under contracts for certain companies and building out different products. Seekar builds out software under the four principles mentioned above to be licensed under different companies and different individuals in general. As they matured and began acquiring more customers, they transitioned to the more scalable service model. A custom API that allows users to train their own models on their own data has allowed them to begin to scale much faster. Being able to make AI explainable is a big topic right now in AI. If AI is to be fully trusted in sensitive applications such as medicine and facial recognition, AI models need to be able to explain their decisions to the degree that a human can. This is what Seekar is building.Seekar can print out reports to explain every decision a neural network makes with its technology. Seekar has a huge focus on mobility – without tying anything to a cloud. Seekar’s technology can compress everything small enough to fit onto a device, to make everything so small that you protect patient’s and/or people’s data because there is nothing transmitted back and forth. The technology can run faster in real time.

There is also quite a bit of emphasis on ethics right now in the Artificial Intelligence space. Data can be super biased in the AI world. Seekar can take a particular interest in a particular sensitivity and go through the data, making sure that everything is addressed from multiple angles. It reads as much bias from the data as possible. This is particularly advantageous in a realm such as medicine, where misclassification can result in dire consequences.

Seekar’s products update themselves over time while also maintaining accuracy and consistency, while also pruning away things that do not need to be classified anymore. This allows a Seekar AI model to self-learn to identify new patterns without human intervention over time. Most deployed AI models today do not facilitate this type of feature. Once they are deployed, they can only identify the categories of objects they were programmed for until they are retrained.

Seekar originally started by just meeting with clients to try and tailor an exact solution to what they wanted. Originally, Seekar was feeling out the market in general to see where things will go. Original investors felt that their investment was best protected by Seekar trying to attract revenue from multiple industries in case one industry proved intractable. Now, Seekar has a scalable API with different marketing strategies which can be used for different industries and customers. They’ve particularly narrowed focus on the medical and autonomous vehilce industries. However, Seekar’s platform has been built to be on several different processors in different industries with different use cases to prove that its technology is capable of exceptional performance in diverse environments.

Challenges Encountered

Seekar is targeting industries, such as autonomous vehicles in agriculture and some aspects of medicine. They are specifically focused on industries that do not gain significant AI investment, do not receive adequae AI research, and do not quite understand AI or how it can be used in their business practices. This makes it more challenging to do business in general. However, once you explain the use of AI to these industries, they become enthusiastic. Some companies even contribute to Seekar’s funding. This has been a unique learning lesson that Seekar has encountered along the way.

Another challenge is marketing and sales. AI can sometimes sell itself in some regard since it’s a hot topic now but being able to paint a picture for your clients, users, and customers that enables them to purchase the product can be very challenging. Kordel sees the potential of AI in so many ways and how it can affect so many different lives. He sees how certain forks in the road can be because a company is not using AI. Relaying this message to companies is something Kordel has personally struggled with when marketing Seekar.

Future Endeavors

Seekar is working towards setting a standard for AI, in being explainable and mobile, trying to really branch out to industries that aren’t getting a lot of attention with AI. Seekar’s goal is to democratize AI and facilitate adequate attention and investment in the industries such as agriculture, security, medicine, recreation, and energy. Seekar hopes to be a huge contributor in these spaces, all while creating unbiased data sets.

Seekar is striving to explain their decisions so that they can adopt more trust with Artificial Intelligence, earning more of people’s trust in different industries. Seekar’s ultimate goal is to simulate human consciousness. Its computer vision platform is designed specifically to follow the architecture of the human visual cortex and they hope that further development allows it to fully replicate and simulate certain aspects of human cognition in the near future.

Advice For Aspiring Entrepreneurs

The first piece of advice is to seek negative feedback. This is challenging, but negative feedback allows you to stay on path with your products, making sure you do not steer off course. Going through a very tough process of being extremely critical of your idea and your technology, and then seeking feedback is incredibly important.

On the other hand, there is no one that’s going to realize your vision like you are. If something is important enough to you, you must take that negative feedback into consideration for your customers, but also be willing to sift through what is relevant and explainable.

It’s also important to question the status quo. AI can be an incredibly transformative, untapped technology. It’s synonymous now to what the internet was in the 1990s. We’re largely still experimenting with a lot of things AI can do – and its capabilities are greatly untouched. This allows smaller players to enter the market and really make a massive impact.

Gain the negative feedback but remain confident in your vision.

https://seekartech.com/