Colorado is not exactly a flyover state when it comes to tech, but it’s also not exactly the first place people think of when the word “innovation” is uttered. While the state’s companies may fly under the radar, they are no less innovative than those headquartered on either coast. Agriculture, health care and e-commerce are just three of the many industries the state’s tech companies are pushing forward.
Tortuga AgTech is leveraging cutting-edge artificial intelligence technologies to build robots that are smart enough to pick fruit and learn how to work more efficiently while doing so. Strive Health is using data to make kidney disease care more effective, personalized and affordable. In the e-commerce space, Ibotta is implementing a partnership with Walmart that could bring cashback to the masses, not just those with the right plug-ins.
Of course, the innovation happening at these companies isn’t intangible, nor is it driven by a select brain trust. It’s powered by tech innovators who come to work every day driven to do their jobs well and make their mark. We had the chance recently to speak with three of these local tech innovators and learn more about the work they’re doing and how it’s shaping the future of their industries.
The next frontier in e-commerce is cashback, at least if Ibotta has anything to say about it. The e-commerce company is currently working with Walmart to launch a new digital offers program, with Mandy Shares, director of product design, and her team playing a crucial role. If all goes according to plan, Shares told Built In that scoring deals on everyday purchases won’t just be “true for couponers any longer.”
What’s the coolest project you’re working on at the moment or have worked on recently? What makes/made this project so innovative or exciting?
One of the coolest projects we’re working on is a partnership with Walmart to bring a brand new digital offers program to their online properties. It’s been an exciting ride for many reasons! We are using our technology and years of experience to enable one of the largest international retailers to help their customers save even more. Throughout our conversations with Walmart, we paired our product design and business development teams to use UX design as a strategic tool to help communicate the value a program like this could have.
Now that this initiative is underway, it’s been exciting to provide thought leadership from our 10 years of experience to ensure the success of the program for our joint users. This process has reinforced the value great design leadership can bring to an organization in a unique way.
We are using our technology and years of experience to enable one of the largest international retailers to help their customers save even more.”
What do you envision for the future of your industry? And how is your work helping to shape that future and bring it to life?
When it comes to the future of shopping, there’s a growing expectation that you will be rewarded for any purchase you make. We’re able to help everyone be a smart shopper and feel confident in their purchase decisions without having to spend hours hunting for the best deal in ways that were not possible five or 10 years ago.
The product design team’s goal is to make the rewarded shopping experience as easy as possible, not only by partnering with retailers like Walmart but by creating ways to save no matter where or how you shop. My team has been influential in helping drive a contextual and personal omnichannel approach to our product strategy by bringing the design thinking process into conversations with teams across Ibotta, from senior leadership to our cross-functional squads.
The health care industry is seemingly centered around reactive care, which Strive Health is trying to change. The company’s kidney care platform is designed to identify kidney disease patients earlier and get them the right treatment at the right time. Data is at the heart of the company’s operations, which has enabled Sarah Morgan, senior data engineer, to do work that is challenging, meaningful and making an impact on the health care industry.
What’s the coolest project you’re working on at the moment or have worked on recently? What makes/made this project so innovative or exciting?
I have had the opportunity to help design and build Strive’s data platform, a collection of tools, capabilities and multi-sourced data integrations from providers, payors, administration and centralized clinical data resources. This platform is a crucial part of our ability to support predictive analytics and provide our clinical team with a comprehensive picture of a patient’s medical history and health events, allowing us to identify patients faster and predict disease progression.
During the implementation of our first partners, I was able to identify the necessary data sources for individual patients who would be joining our care programs, and we used that information to design and build a data-focused “kidney care” model. This model needed to include many disparate data sources, including program eligibility based on kidney disease progression and patient relationships with the care team members. Another critical piece of this integration was patient identification and matching. The team and I worked together to ensure that the clinical team was getting the right insights to the right people at the right time.
The work that our technology and clinical teams are doing will change the trajectory of health care and how kidney care is done.”
What do you envision for the future of your industry? And how is your work helping to shape that future and bring it to life?
I believe that more companies are becoming data-driven organizations the way Strive has. Rather than just treating data as an asset, we center and leverage our data platform to benefit the lives of thousands of patients. The work that our technology and clinical teams are doing will change the trajectory of health care and how kidney care is done.
The future of agriculture is robots, or smarter robots. That’s what Brian Heath, machine learning and data lead at Tortuga AgTech, is working on. We’ll let him explain the details.
What’s the coolest project you’re working on at the moment or have worked on recently? What makes/made this project so innovative or exciting?
At Tortuga, we provide value to our farmer customers by helping them harvest fruit more efficiently and sustainably. One way that we achieve this goal is by leveraging multiple deep learning models and other AI/ML techniques to instruct our robots to select only sufficiently ripe fruits and avoid mistakenly picking anything else, like leaves.
To take our harvesting logic to the next level, we recently decided to leverage cutting-edge technologies, including active learning and reinforcement learning. These systems empower robots to discover for themselves how best to interpret their environment to make intelligent picking decisions. Robots receive virtual rewards for improving their understanding of their environment over time, which permits them to refine their picking logic much faster than humans could for them.
Alongside two machine learning experts and our most tenured software engineer, we developed and tested these systems in our Denver laboratory environment before perfecting the logic on farms overseas. Within four months we went from a strategic project plan to deploying extremely modern machine learning algorithms on our robots.
To take our harvesting logic to the next level, we recently decided to leverage cutting-edge technologies, including active learning and reinforcement learning.”
What do you envision for the future of your industry? And how is your work helping to shape that future and bring it to life?
Our mission is to build a healthier society and a thriving planet through smarter farming. The future of the agriculture industry is one where farmers use specific and actionable insights based on vast datasets to decrease costs while improving the quality and accessibility of fresh produce for consumers. Our robots generate such datasets while performing harvesting, cultivation or scouting tasks.
Tortuga has distinguished itself in the agtech space by building strong relationships with our supportive farming partners. With their guidance, we have been successful in addressing their most critical data-related needs and we are expanding our product offering for data acquisition and analytics each month.
Currently, I am most energized about Tortuga’s initiatives related to crop yield forecasting. Our robots collect data on individual fruits and plants at a greater scale and specificity than anyone else in our space. We use this data to generate predictive models that factor into farmers’ operational and commercial strategies each week. Being part of the adoption of analytics driven by robots with farmers around the world is truly exciting!
