GAINESVILLE, Fla. (WCJB) – In this week’s Tech Tuesday, our partners at UF Innovate and SCAD Media feature Vetra, a startup using artificial intelligence to make searching complex information like patents and other data easier. CEO Alexander Simes explains how the technology works and what’s next for the company.
“What if we could use artificial intelligence to propel innovation? We’re here with Vetra to learn more. Alex, tell us a little bit more about who you are and what you do,” said Elora Duong, host of UF Innovate.
“My name is Alex. I’m the CEO of Vetra. What we do kind of redefines the way that search happens. So basically, with one sentence search, you can quickly find all of the associated materials for what you’re looking for. Currently, that’s patents, and we plan to step into people, information, etc.,” said Alex Simes, CEO of Vetra.
“What made you want to go into work with AI and patents?” asked Duong.
“So, I was hospitalized my sophomore year in high school with acute respiratory failure and pneumonia, and over that time I kind of developed the product. It was a reformable CPAP mask, and then I ended up filing a patent for it. In doing that, I saw a lot of the problems with the existing tools out there, the legal system, and wanted to develop a change that could solve some of the problems I faced,” said Simes.
“How are you guys expanding past patent work?” asked Duong.
“Yeah, so we had a key insight after talking to the head of financial crimes at Fidelity that having information is important, whatever industry you’re in. So, in our case, we found that you could use the same thing to track people for money laundering. We had the thought of, hey, how do we apply this toward finding information on people, companies, and other associated technologies? And we wanted to go a little bit bigger,” said Simes.
“How are you tackling the drawbacks of generative AI?” asked Duong.
“So, I think the important thing is hallucinations happen if you have a massive data set, right? And our method of minimizing one of the big problems of AI, which is hallucination, is by keeping all of the data centered on the relevant search. So, if you’re searching based on patents, we’re only using the US patent database, which is not done by major competitors like ChatGPT, Perplexity, et cetera. We minimize hallucination by keeping a source in actual data. And unlike other kinds of AI services that are training on your data, the last thing somebody wants is for that to be released in the public domain because you give it to somebody and they train on it or having them steal your data. So, that’s incredibly important to us. We take that very seriously,” said Simes.
“If you’re interested in learning more about Vetra, make sure to follow Alex or Vetra on LinkedIn,” said Duong.
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