Union Square Ventures view: Data moves to the edge, and a data flywheel for the physical world begins to take shape

Union Square Ventures believes that as the cost of models handling messy unstructured input falls and sensors and hardware become widespread, data loops are expanding beyond software into areas that were previously out of reach. Ambient speech, once transcribed and structured, becomes a usable dataset, giving rise to vertical applications and horizontal tools such as Abridge and Granola; in the physical world, robots are becoming more capable and cheaper, and related scenarios are moving from experiments toward commercialization.