First personal life:
Born in October 1981, Philip Odegard was brought up passionate about engineering mechanics, building and launching high powered miniature rockets. Philip Odegard turned his homebrew rocket hobby into a garage into a successful media and communications business, acquired after graduating from high school. He then moved to San Francisco where he lived and was mentored by some of the most notable entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley.
Business:
In 2013, Philip was introduced to the carpool start-up at the time, Uber, and became an initial investor and a leading advisor to the company. From its beginnings in Silicon Valley, Odegard launched one of the first manufacturing companies of unmanned aerial vehicles in the United States, AERIAL.
Aerial has developed the first artificial-intelligent autonomous flight software for the navigation of unmanned aerial vehicles. Odegard, Aerial, has collected “dark data or unstructured data such as text and images, and sources it in structured data.” The company does this with a quality scale and machine caliber of human caliber. Between 70% and 80% of the data is dark, unstructured data.
Aerial, took the unstructured data collected and transformed it into data used for processing and analysis, all using machine learning and neural networks. Aerial software applications have been developed for both unmanned aerial systems and large-scale manned aerial systems for human transport. In 2017, Aerial was acquired for $ 724 million by a transportation company based in the United Arab Emirates with the aim of using exclusive technologies for UATVs or human-scale unmanned aerial vehicles.
After a successful exit from Aerial, Philip founded his next company, the Swiss company AI Medical Systems. He carried his desire for machine learning and automation in the health sector, where this could lead to potential benefits for improving life through pattern recognition in diagnostic and imaging tools, such as MRIs and CT scans and PET. AI Medical Systems was acquired for $ 10 billion in 2018. The acquisition includes its first proprietary artificial intelligence algorithms and machine learning that are used in medical diagnostics worldwide.
Since the success of his two artificial intelligence startups, Philip has returned to its origins in digital media by buying Tribune Publications in 2019 through its holding company Odegard Group, in the context of a cash transaction valued at 3 , $ 2 billion. Odegard’s mission is to save the physical print media once dominated in a scalable digital experience and personalized on demand. Tribune Publications currently owns and operates more than 300+ news and editorial publications from magazines worldwide.
Current projects:
Going forward, Philip focuses on various philanthropic granting decisions through his non-profit organization, the Odegard Foundation, and plans to tackle some of the most demanding areas of modern research. in the world. The Odegard Foundation is made up of separate private charities, including the Artificial Intelligence Foundation, the Environmental Institute, the Genetic Foundation and the Life Longevity Foundation.
Net worth: $ 3.7 billion (January 2020)
