5 DC, Maryland and Virginia companies’ innovations that took the global stage at CES

The annual CES draws thousands upon thousands of tech enthusiasts from throughout the world to inspect some of the latest technological advancements over a week. Those products on display from companies in the capital and surrounding states included a groundbreaking new way to make purchases from the convenience of the driver’s seat; a new gig-economy app to help you get roadside assistance; a phone to help people with advanced memory loss; and an app to connect clinical trials with patients. Learn more about them here:

Norman Cleghorn at the Lightning Track exhibition booth during CES 2024. (Courtesy Lightning Track)

Lightning Track

“As far as the concept, I’ve gotten nothing but good compliments,” said Jamaican-born Harford County, Maryland resident Norman Cleghorn, the creator of the Lightning Track roadside assistance app. As an exhibitor, Cleghorn said it felt bittersweet that he wouldn’t have time to visit the booths of fellow tech innovators as he had last year at the CES. But Lightning Track has been his project since 2020, and he’s working to share it with a wider audience.

The roadside assistance app currently has over 10,000 customers and 1,000 contracting roadside assistance drivers signed up. Those contract drivers help fellow motorists with disabled vehicles by offering up to six services: battery jumps, gas replenishment, tire changes, lockout relief, EV charge help and towing assistance.

“The whole point of it is to provide faster service,” Cleghorn said. “The concept is very similar to how you would get a Lyft or Uber.”

He said the difference between choosing Lightning Track instead of AAA or car insurance coverage for roadside help was the lack of ongoing subscription costs or fees. According to him, it can also take as little as 15 minutes to receive aid from a Lightning Track contract driver, whereas other options can take upwards of an hour to arrive.

Sheeva.AI

Another transportation system exhibited at CES was Sheeva.AI, located in Vienna, Virginia. The in-cabin payment system promises to allow car travelers to pay for goods and services without even rolling down their windows. The tech is designed to allow users to buy gas, purchase drive-through items, pay toll fees and complete other payments from inside the vehicle.

Sheeva.AI was among the DC-area exhibitors at last year’s CES, around which time it raised a $9.25 million Series A. Founder Evgeny Klochikhin said that their booth at this year’s trade show was especially popular. He also made a case for the company’s value proposition.

“Our market is really huge,” he said. “This is a new market. We’re breaking new ground here. Nobody’s done it before. The biggest challenge is creating the entire market infrastructure. What that means is connecting the dots between the car [automakers and fleets], and then connecting it to the service providers, such as fuel stations, charging stations. These are huge companies.”

Currently, Klochikhin said, Sheeva.AI is using Visa architecture to help facilitate the service. There have been multiple proofs of concepts for the system, and it is going into production with a major Indian auto manufacturer in February.

Sheeva.AI will be ready to engage US automakers in the second quarter of this year, Klochikhin said.

“That is the message we’re trying to send to all the automakers in collaboration with them: ‘Hey guys, we’re ready for you. Let’s go,’” he said.

RAZ Mobility

There were two DMV exhibitors from the medical tech field too. RAZ Mobility, based out of Tysons Corner, Virginia, is offering assistive phone technology to help individuals with dementia and their caretakers communicate. The firm’s cell phones are being introduced with a dementia care AI advisor.

“In the caregiver app, you can access an advisor that’s basically like ChatGPT, except that its model is trained with clinically proven data about dementia,” said CEO Robert Felgar, who founded the company in 2017. “The caregiver can access this advisor at any time for free and get assistance with helping people with dementia. It’s really cool.”

Another new feature is a voice recognition technology that trains on a verbally-challenged person’s language use to provide an accurate text translation for those they are communicating with.

“You have what we call ‘non-standard speech,’” Felgar said. “You train your own voice model with 200 repetitions. The model learns your particular way of speaking and then when you have a phone call with our phone, the person you’re speaking to will see translated captions.”

RAZ Mobile will be embedding the AI-oriented speech recognition tech, developed by Israel-based VoiceItt, in its cell phones to make the advancement possible. It is expected to be available in the next month or so, Felgar said.

A rendering of FindMyClinicalTrial’s platform, as taken from a company presentation deck. (Courtesy FindMyClinicalTrial)

FindMyClinicalTrial

FindMyClinicalTrial exhibited the beta version of its mobile medtech platform at CES as well.

The new app aims to connect pharmaceutical industry firms with institutions and patients in a much more efficient and effective way than what currently exists.

“We are creating the first front-to-end product that simplifies the entire clinical trial recruitment process,” founder and CEO Killian Lozach, a resident of DC, told Technical.ly via email. “I think the strongest point that FindMyClinicalTrial offers is our capabilities to engage patients and hospitals better than any other recruitment firm out there.”

FindMyClinicalTrial is expected to release its app and software by the end of this year and begin working with clients and customers in the DMV.

He said pharmaceutical corporations often spend upwards of $200 million to successfully develop a single drug or treatment. He wants FindMyClinicalTrial to be part of the solution to getting better quality drugs out faster to the patients who need them.

“We’re scaling this as fast as we can,” Lozach said in a follow-up phone interview. “We’re starting to have a presence (and) have the right conversations. If pharma can find a cheaper way forward for them, it will be cheaper for everyone else, too.”

Artifcts

DC-based company Artifcts came to CES to demo its signature platform as part of AARP’s AgeTech Collaborative, a program to support startups working on tech solutions for the country’s aging population. Artifcts’ platform helps users catalog physical objects and code them to “capture, preserve, and share the histories, stories, and value behind” those objects as a way to reduce clutter, according to CEO and cofounder Heather Nickerson.

“We help families create a roadmap for what happens next with all their ‘stuff,'” said Nickerson, who cofounded the company after she lost her mother and needed to deal with the physical emotional remnants, in an email. “If they are downsizing, great, keep the memories, lose the stuff! If they are looking to pass things down to the next generation, even better, ensure that the stories, history, value, and all those important documents go along with the actual item.”

Nickerson said that feedback at CES was generally positive. Going forward, she said she wants people to use the company’s product while working on wills and estate resolution. She also said that the company is exploring potential options for virtual reality and “self-created ‘to-do’ lists” that could help potential users at a time when grief makes these tasks harder.