March 19, 2025, BELLEVUE, Washington – Khasm Labs (formerly 5G Open Innovation Labs) today announced its Telco AI Cloud pilot. Unveiled at MWC 2025 this breakthrough initiative, powered by strategic partnerships, redefines how telcos, software developers and enterprises leverage data to transform urban safety and unlock greater strategic value.
Transforming Urban Safety
The Telco AI Cloud pilot showcases a production-ready, agentic AI solution for pedestrian safety. Trained on real-time City of Bellevue data to deliver near-instant responses to intersection incidents, Telco AI Cloud makes urban safety proactive and scalable and proves that real-time edge AI can be seamlessly integrated into everyday city management.
Unlocking Strategic Value from Data
In an era where data is the oil and AI the refinery, telco networks are uniquely positioned to offer powerful edge-based AI processing services. The Telco AI Cloud pilot demonstrates how transforming raw data into actionable insights can shift telco business models— unlocking providers’ ability to move upstream from simple connectivity enablers to dynamic, consumption-based platforms. This transition enables telcos to become more relevant, empowers software developers to build more innovative edge AI solutions, and helps enterprises turn their data into competitive advantage.
“This pilot is focused on a clear vision: that the future belongs to those who harness the power of data and AI at the edge to drive real-world impact. Our journey with Telco AI Cloud is about proving the tangible business value of edge AI processing for Telcos, developers, and enterprises,” said Jim Brisimitzis, CEO and General Partner of Khasm Labs. “Our Telco AI Cloud pilot, showcased recently at MWC garnering positive response, shows we understand market signals and validates the telco business case for investing in robust, edge-based AI infrastructure. Critics have doubted that telcos could evolve into dynamic, consumption-based platforms. This pilot disproved those nay-sayers. By leveraging the telco edge, we’re not only unlocking untapped revenue streams and operational efficiencies for enterprises, we’re driving a wave of digital innovation, investments, and revenue that traditional telcos stand to miss.”
Hands-on engineering-led innovation and enterprise implementations
“Over the last year Khasm Labs embraced hands-on engineering-led innovation, leveraging our vast ecosystem of telcos, technology platform providers, and consulting firms and startups to design and implement solutions that are enterprise stress-tested and enterprise-ready, as evidenced by Telco AI Cloud and Khasm Enterprise Edge Network (KEEN),” says Jim Brisimitzis, General Manager of Khasm Labs. “But at the end of the day, this is not about technology, it is about startups and enterprises working hand in hand to apply that technology to solve pressing business challenges in the real world. Nothing else like this exists — in either the telco or startup realm.”
Brisimitzis points to successful deployments of Khasm Labs’ integrated solutions, including private cellular networks within the Port of Tacoma supporting clients such as Washington United Terminals, TOTE Maritime, Trident Seafoods among other clients.
Eight new AI-focused startups join the Khasm Labs Ecosystem
Khasm Labs also announced today the addition of eight new multi-stage startups, handpicked for their AI focus, to its ecosystem as part of the Batch 11 Spring program. Solving pressing challenges in AI security, edge computing, robotics and large-scale AI deployment, these companies represent cutting-edge innovation, and commercialization maturity in their respective areas.
“According to the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 AI will drive 86% of business transformations by 2030 as enterprises across sectors embrace AI in a shift toward higher-value, technology-enabled work. However, only 27-33% of companies are investing in advanced AI applications, such as process automation or AI-powered decision support systems. Through our ecosystem and system integration work, we help startups stress test their innovation for enterprise adoption, connect to enterprise demand, and bridge that chasm,” says Brisimitzis.
The eight startups included in Khasm Labs’ Batch 11 Cohort include:
Protect AI – A cybersecurity company for AI, Protect AI empowers organizations with a platform of product offerings to secure their AI applications and machine learning (ML) models, end-to-end. The company recently announced a$60M Series B funding led by Evolution Equity Partners and joined by notable investors such as 01 Advisors, StepStone Group, and Samsung for a total of funds raised of $108M.
AI Squared – AI Squared helps large organizations bring AI to where work happens. We do this by leveraging our SaaS or on-prem platform which combines data sources with advanced AL/ML functionality and embeds intelligent insights into mission-critical business applications. Trusted by the largest financial institutions, the most complicated supply chain logistics companies, and the US Department of Defense, we enable seamless collaboration between data science teams and business users, driving faster, more informed decision-making.
Peer Robotics – Peer Robotics is a collaborative mobile robotics company building material handling solutions for the manufacturing sector. Peer Robotics’ robots can learn from humans in real-time allowing people on the shop floors to easily integrate and deploy the robots at their convenience.
Synthefy – Synthefy has developed a time series foundation model that combines multimodal data with time series data to deliver powerful verticalized solutions. Synthefy’s time series foundation model achieves state-of-the-art results in data retrieval, synthetic data generation, digital twin creation, forecasting, anomaly detection, and predictive maintenance.
Nedge – Nedge is a patented application acceleration platform that dynamically offloads real-time cloud workloads to the edge—with novel virtual integration back to the main workspace. It delivers high performance, low maintenance, and native UX on low-costs devices like Raspberry Pi and highly secure “zero clients”, avoiding tradeoffs in the traditional cloud models. Initially focused on AI-upscaled browsing and plugin-free Unified Communications, Nedge pioneers high-fidelity cloud computing on-the-go.
Arcee AI – Arcee AI, established in 2023 and based in San Francisco, California, is a pioneer in small language models (SLMs). Their offerings include, Arcee Orchestra, an end-to-end agentic AI solution, powered by their industry-leading SLMs, that enables businesses to create AI agents for complex tasks and Arcee Conductor, an intelligent model router that automatically routes inputs to specialized SLMs and LLMs, based on the task and domain complexity, to deliver detailed, trustworthy responses, fast.
Narada AI – Narada AI is revolutionizing enterprise productivity with Agentic Process Automation. Based on new research from the UC Berkeley AI Lab, Narada’s Large Action Models (LAMs) go beyond content generation to actually plan, orchestrate, and execute complex tasks across different enterprise tools and ecosystems.
Seamlessly integrating and executing across enterprise tools such as ServiceNow, Salesforce.com, SAP, billing systems, internal portals, as well as collaboration tools like Slack and email, Narada automates tedious workflows for processing invoices, updating records, managing approvals, and IT housekeeping—all without scripting or coding.
Narada turns natural-language instructions into executable automations, operating tools through a combination of API function calls and browser-based UI automation. With on-prem deployment options for enterprise security and compliance, Narada AI is the future of enterprise automation—helping IT, finance, and operations teams scale automation into all corners of the enterprise.
Collinear AI – Collinear is the AI performance improvement platform that helps enterprises build trust in their AI solutions. Our suite of proprietary AI judges systematically identifies performance gaps, deploys real-time guardrails, generates high-quality training data, and seamlessly enhances model performance. Leading enterprises such as Kore.ai, MasterClass and ServiceNow trust Collinear to accelerate deployments while ensuring brand-aligned responses, transforming good AI into great AI.
About Khasm Labs
Khasm Labs is a global innovation ecosystem bringing together multi-stage startups, enterprises, global technology platforms and investors to connect and collaborate on developing disruptive new technologies and bridging the chasm between startup innovation and enterprise adoption.
Since 2019, the Lab has attracted world-class corporate and industry partners and 146 multi-stage enterprise startups collectively raising $3.338B of venture capital. Through its recently announced KhasmX, the Lab employs a model of open collaborative innovation, where corporate partners work directly with ecosystem startups to accelerate commercialization through proof of concept, go-to-market, and other engagements and opportunities.
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For further information contact:
Ellyn Winters-Robinson
Ignition Communications (PR for Khasm Labs)
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