Two weeks ago, the first batch of 500 Startups’ new Data Track kicked off in San Francisco, alongside the twenty-second incarnation of our flagship Seed Program. We selected some of the most innovative startups in big data, machine learning and AI to participate in the intensive 3-month program.

Today, we’re excited to share the inaugural cohort, which consists of 7 companies from 7 different countries around the world:

Botsociety (Italy)
Botsociety is a design tool for previewing, prototyping and testing conversational interfaces.

Curio.io (United Kingdom)
Curio.io delivers professionally narrated audio of curated articles from leading news publications like The Financial Times and The Guardian.

Mobile Forms (Nigeria)
Mobile Forms is a platform for local and international businesses to crowdsource reliable market data in Nigeria.

OpenUp (USA)
OpenUp measures the impact on purchase behavior across online and offline ads.

reDock (Canada)
reDock is a proposal automation solution that mines and tailors corporate information on-demand to help professional services companies win complex RFPs.

Texel (Israel)
Texel enables efficient streaming of VR/AR content over existing networks by using viewing data and behavioral analytics to reduce the bandwidth by more than 50%.

VCV (Russia)
VCV is an AI-powered recruiter that identifies candidates, automatically screens them using voice recognition and submits a video interview of qualified candidates directly to hiring managers.

Also, check out Venture Beat’s coverage of our first data track. 

Chris Neumann is a big data veteran who co-founded DataHero (acquired by Cloudability), and was the first employee at Aster Data (acquired by Teradata). Travel lover and sports nut. Unapologetically Canadian. For more from Chris, connect with him on Linkedin or Twitter.