No booth and no small talk: AI agent conference kicks off: "More than 100 startups have registered"
The Quantum Hub platform is holding a first-of-its-kind conference where AI agents manage the initial screening and introduction phase between corporations and startups. Instead of investing resources in dozens of "corridor conversations," the system identifies an exact match between industry needs and relevant technologies, passing the case to human interaction only when there is real feasibility.
Every day we read about more uses for AI agents, and apparently the next thing was inevitable. Next month, Quantum Hub will hold AgentsConf: Deep Tech, an event where AI agents are supposed to perform the initial matching phase between startups and corporations. According to the company, the goal is not to replace the meeting between people, but to arrive at it after the agents have already checked if there is a need, capability, and business reason to talk. So far, more than 100 deep-tech startups have already registered for the event.
"The problem today is not finding more technology. There is a huge amount of excellent technologies and companies," says Liav Ben-Rubi, CEO of Quantum Hub. "The challenge is to understand which technology is relevant to a real need of the organization, who within the organization needs it, and whether the conditions exist to turn this connection into a real project. From our perspective, a meeting is not a success in itself. It must start with a clear business reason."
Quantum Hub connects industry with startups and operates with a network of more than 300 companies in Israel and the world, including companies from the Taavura-Livnat group, Hyundai, VDL, MSC, Bazan Group, and MedOne. Its activity focuses, among other things, on transport, logistics, industry, defense, energy, and infrastructure. Unlike a model that starts with a startup and tries to find a possible use for it within a corporation, the company says it starts with the need coming from the industry, maps the problem, locates relevant technologies, and in suitable cases accompanies a proof-of-concept (POC) and the path to commercialization.
As part of the event, for every startup that registered in advance and was found suitable, an agent is built that receives information about the company, the product, the technology, and its capabilities. For the large companies, according to Quantum Hub, agents have already been built that know the organization, the fields in which it operates, and the needs and challenges it is looking for solutions for. The agents are supposed to ask questions, check for matches, and examine even less obvious directions for cooperation, and only then pass the relevant cases to a human meeting.
"When a startup comes to a corporation, the two sides do not always speak the same language," says Ben-Rubi. "The startup knows its technology in depth, and the corporation knows its problem in depth. Many times the challenge is to translate between them and find the meeting point where the technology can truly create value. That is where a large part of our work lies."
The event will also include a physical meeting, but the focus will be on a virtual event that will be displayed on a screen in real-time: the agents will communicate with each other, and the conversations will be displayed alongside the questions they raise, the status of the conversation, and the directions being examined. At the end of the process, each startup is supposed to receive a report showing which companies its agent spoke with, where no match was found, and where there is a recommendation to proceed to a human meeting, including the reason for the match.
Currently, the company is engaged in finding solutions for cooling data centers, predictive maintenance in advanced industry and marine systems, and robotics and Physical AI for defense and dual-use applications. In fields like industry, transport, energy, and infrastructure, testing a technology may require access to a physical facility, existing systems, data, and professional teams from within the organization. Therefore, Quantum Hub also operates a POC environment for testing technologies in conditions as close as possible to actual use.
"We don't want to take humans out of the process, but exactly the opposite," says Ben-Rubi. "If it is possible to let technology do part of the screening, research, and introductory conversations, human time can be invested in conversations where a match already exists. The goal is not to have more meetings, but to have fewer and better meetings."
According to the event details, the process is built in three stages: the companies define the challenge, the capability gap, or the solution they are looking for, and the startups input information about their product or idea; then a dedicated AI agent is built that represents each side and is based on the information entered; and in the third stage, the agents of the corporations and startups communicate directly and surface filtered matches. Quantum Hub says that the platform is secure and complies with the SOC 2 standard.
The model is intended to save startups the many resources involved in participating in traditional conferences, such as the costs of setting up a booth, travel, and business development teams, while having the ability to reach hundreds of entities in one day. Future use of the model may expand beyond conferences to ongoing processes of locating suppliers, partners, and customers throughout the industry.
