Meet Asia’s first accelerator for AI startups, founded by a Techstars London director

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There’s a new startup accelerator in Hong Kong called Zeroth.ai, and it’s accepting applications from artificial intelligence startups throughout Asia.

It’s started by Tak Lo, who was a director at Techstars London. Techstars is one of the pioneers of the startup accelerator movement. The accelerator has on its team Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn and Jon Bradford, the former managing director of Techstars London.

Zeroth will offer mentorship and US$20,000 in capital to startups for 6 percent equity. The first program will be run from November 7 this year to February 17, 2017.

The accelerator is named after zero-based numbering, which is basically a way of numbering that starts from zero (as opposed to one, which we normally use when counting things). Zero-based numbering is commonly used in computer programming.

AI, which includes machine learning and deep learning, looks to become the next hot sector in tech. Leading tech companies like Google, Apple, and Microsoft are racing to build smarter applications that learn by themselves, using neural networks.

This field presents opportunities for startups as well. Viv, founded by the creators of Siri, is building a smarter virtual assistant. X.ai and Mimetic have built bots that arrange meetings for you.

As AI advances and more open source tools become available, startups will come up with creative and unexpected solutions. Zeroth hopes to be play a part in helping them succeed.

“Theres a ton of vernacular about Skynet – which is bollocks. We can harness AI’s superpower by empowering founders with AI,” says Tak Lo.