Stata Ventures is Kaizen interviewee Ray Stata’s venture capital vehicle. It recently provided funding to technology startup Lyric Semiconductor.
Lyric is developing probability chip technology. Traditional chips use binary “yes/no” switches, but probability chips “can accept inputs and calculate outputs that are between 0 and 1, directly representing probabilities, or levels of certainty.” Commercial applications of this technology include better error correction and faster operation for portable flash drives; better prediction of consumer behavior for websites like Amazon (and better product recommendations for customers); and faster, cheaper large scale data processing.
Here’s a video interview with Ben Vigoda and Mira Wilczek, co-founder/CEO and Director of Business Development of Lyric, respectively, in which they explain probability chips:
Read more about Lyric at the New York Times and VentureBeat.
For more about the excellent Ray Stata, here is my extended Kaizen interview with him from last year.