Introduction: Welcome to Five & Thrive: a weekly podcast highlighting the Southeast’s most interesting news, entrepreneurs, and information of the week, all under 5 minutes. 

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My name is Jon Birdsong and I’m with Atlanta Ventures. 

Product Release of the Week: Who doesn’t love a good product release and this week, after much anticipated industry coverage, Greenzie has pushed a major update to their software. Quick reminder about Greenzie, they are a software company that makes commercial lawn mowers autonomous. They have partnered with manufacturers including Wright Manufacturing and Bobcat to build the mowers with a few more bells and whistles so they can be activated into autonomous mowers. Landscapers love them, especially landscapers who mow big, wide open fields. This week, Greenzie launched a major update to their software including: Job saving and reloading: Map an area once and mow all season with the press of a button on an easy-to-use interface with no app download required. So now a lawn maintenance company can mow the perimeter of a property once and it’s saved in the database so you don’t have to mow the perimeter again. Before, you had to mow the perimeter each time. Not any more. Another major feature is job continuation. If your mower or job was interrupted now you can pick up where you left off with ease. Before it would start over from the beginning. These are huge workflow updates along with several other enhancements! Congrats to the Greenzie engineering team on delivering to the market.   

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Quiet Giant of the Week: This company just moved their HQ to 999 Peachtree Street which is 10th and Peachtree, right where Empire State South used to be. The name of the company is called FIXD Automotive. They have approximately 40 employees led by CEO, John Gattusso. Fixd is a hardware and software company that offers drivers the tools and resources that produce money saved and peace-of-mind over the life of their car. Their FIXD Sensor, which works with any gas-powered car since 1996 relays car problems from the vehicle to the FIXD App via Bluetooth. With the FIXD sensor, now you can translate 7000+ engine codes into plain English on your smartphone, see how severe your issue is, access detailed repair guides and how-to videos, monitor the health of multiple vehicles, and receive automated maintenance alerts. FIXD started out of Create-X and has been a Quiet Giant, growing steadily and quietly for years. 

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Question of the Week: We’ve been getting asked a bunch recently, what is Atlanta Ventures take on Artificial Intelligence? There is no question AI is a transformative evolution in technology. There will be several jobs and roles augmented and alleviated. From a pure consumer perspective, we are users of ChatGPT and Dall-E2 and explore those applications often. When it comes to pure investment in the space, it all depends on how AI is being applied. For example, last week, we invested in AdPipe out of Athens, Ga. They are Motion-First marketing platform that goes and finds specific types of clips in your video library, clips them into 2 second gifs, makes it easy to add overlays and copy, and then packages them up so marketers and sales reps now have a motion-first, customized piece of content. The engineering team is leveraging AI to find those specific clips. For example, one of their most well-known clients is Caterpillar. AdPipe now uses AI to find “videos of tractors” in Caterpillar’s video library and within 30 seconds, AI has gone in and found dozens of videos from years of investment and delivered it to the AdPipe platform. Before AI, someone manually would have to go into the Caterpillar library, watch a lot of video for a few seconds to find tractor clips, clip it, and then upload it to AdPipe. Not anymore. One other point around narrative and storytelling on the fundraising side to highlight with AdPipe; they didn’t brand themselves as a Generative-AI marketing platform when we first engaged with them. They were already solving a very real problem in the market with dozens of industrial customers. Instead, they are using AI to improve a specific use case and workflow. If we met a company that had no customers, limited product or revenue, and they positioned their product as an Generative-AI marketing platform, this is when our spidey senses would have heighted and immediately questioned if this was a spin on a piece of innovative technology looking for a problem to solve. All said and done, when it comes to AI, make sure the problem being solved is a real pain point and apply it smartly – a good example is the AdPipe product. 

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Annnnd that is five minutes!

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Links discussed: 

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🚀Product Release of the Week: Greenzie Product Release Video 

​🎉Quiet Giant: FIXD 

❓Question of the Week:  What do we think about AI?

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