By Karen-Janine Cohen
As artificial intelligence begins to percolate into all aspects of businesses, the need arises for ready-to-go AI programming that will let end users, such as small businesses, essentially plug-and-play, freeing a firm of having to create its own AI coding or programs.
That is what entrepreneur Charles Whiteman, CEO and co-founder of Lamatic.ai, is providing. The company, co-founded by Lamatic.ai CTO Aman Sharma, is headquartered at the Alan B. Levan | NSU Broward Center of Innovation in Fort Lauderdale. The Levan center is a public-private partnership between Nova Southeastern University and Broward County. The goal is to support entrepreneurs and early-stage startups with a variety of programs. Whiteman, Sharma and Lamatic.ai have been through three (Ideate, Incubate and Accelerate) of its core offerings.
Lamatic.ai, which has raised $445,000 pre-seed, identified a niche: helping businesses that don’t want to put time and resources into creating their own AI infrastructure, said Whiteman. They “want to stop investing resources into the ‘plumbing,’ ” he said. Lamatic.ai will tailor the AI process to the client’s needs. One example: a company requested a program to caption thousands of screen shots with a good explanation of what occurs in each shot.
In another soon-to-be published case study, Lamatic.ai created an AI add-on for a travel company that provides highly personalized recommendations to a discerning clientele. Lamatic.ai crafted an application that quickly seeks out detailed and specific information from big data sets to tailor-make options. “We create a virtual travel agent who is looking for this experience and eliminate the time and manpower, (the customer must invest),” Whiteman said. “We are an infrastructure component to reduce the amount of customer code they need to use and maintain.”
The travel company itself manages its interface and website, and, has already collected necessary data – for example how many travelers in a party, what activities they like, in which seasons they prefer to travel and favorite destinations. Take Paris as a destination example. Using the AI feature, a granular itinerary is generated, with, say, four daily activities; free or has a cost; restaurants, festivals, and so forth. “All of that intelligence is powered by the middleware we offer,” Whiteman said.
“We are selling to an audience that is technically knowledgeable,” he said. “They know the outcome they want.”
Whiteman is no novice to entrepreneurship. Originally from Michigan, he moved to Florida to work with Divers Direct, where he helped build its catalog then joined MotionPoint, which specializes in language translation of websites. Once that was sold, Whiteman decided to create a consumer focused app for what must be among the most frequent questions asked (by children, spouses, roommates) every day: What’s for dinner?
In the process of creating the somewhat whimsical app, he and Sharma met on Y Combinator’s technology startup support site, and decided to work together. Sharma said that the platform they were building might be worth more than the product itself. And Lamatic.ai was born.
They quickly came up with a way to market Lamatic.ai as “middle ware,” and three weeks after launching had five customers.
“The way I describe it is we build what we wish we could buy,” Whiteman said. They use a variety of data sources, including large language models and commercially available data sources.
Lamatic.ai officially launched October 23. The company is gaining notice. Whiteman and Sharma recently helped inaugurate the Miami chapter of the GenAI Collective, a community-based group for the emerging IT discipline. Meanwhile, they were picked as one of 200 young companies to participate in TechCrunch’s Startup Battlefield competition.
Whiteman and Sharma want to help demystify AI and its uses.
“Everyone is trying to figure out what to do with generative AI – how to transform theoretical research into practical features,” Sharma said. Once that is solved, businesses can focus on their goals, he said, rather than “how do I get this done.”
Pictured at top of post: Lamatic.ai co-founders Charles Whiteman (CEO) and Aman Sharma (CTO), with Teddy.
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