Philippe Cases
Co-Founder and CEO
Topio Networks
An industry catalyst accelerating the formation of markets by creating communities. Topio Networks has a community of 1.2 million professionals dedicated to making the business of connected things a reality. In addition to running the company, he specializes in Artificial Intelligence and Big Data, Mobility and Smart Cities authoring or coauthoring landscapes in Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, Mobility (connected cars and automated vehicles). He is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and runs the weekly readwrite labs webinar.
Prior to Topio, he was a General Partner of venture funds and made investments consistently as a Venture Capitalist in data technology with companies such as RIghtpoint (Acq. by e.piphany) , Adknowledge (Acq. by CMGI), Inquira (Acq, by Oracle), Vue Technology (Acq. by Sensormatic), Jaspersoft (Acq. by Tibco), Silk Technology (Acq. By Palantir), and Akili Interactive.
His entire life he's been interested in innovation: while in engineering school, helped launch the school local radio station and his home town’s first job fair. During his first job in the mid-1980s, he became interested in Big Data and AI. At the time, he helped develop one of the first commercial rule engines to select loans and build a report generator focused on evaluating company financial risks. Both products have been used at the time in the bank branches.
As part of being an investor, he spotted SaaS as a trend in 1997 and made his first investments in the space then. Following the early 2000 meltdown, he developed a model to spot financial trends and evaluate timing of investment opportunities. This approach contributed to top decile fund returns in the two funds he was involved with. The landscapes Topio develops are directly inherited from this methodology.
Specialties: Smart Cities, Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, Dapps, Open Source, SaaS, Low-cost business model, Edge Computing, IoT