Boston venture capitalists take a longish view of 2022

Synthetic characters. You’ve heard about “deep fakes” — convincing replicas of real people saying things they never said in digital videos. But Rob Go of NextView Ventures in Boston thinks the same technology will be used to create intelligent, virtual characters for customer service, entertainment and gaming, and other uses. “We are hitting a convergence between the quality of these technologies and the willingness of end-users to engage with bots and virtual characters,” Go says. Before long, a convincingly real Betty Crocker may serve up baking advice on your iPad, or a sympathetic Flo will handle your insurance claim.

Digital twins. Speaking of replicas, what if you created a digital duplicate of a factory or electrical generating plant, and you could use software to analyze where things might break down — or how to make them run more efficiently? That’s the idea behind digital twins. Rudina Seseri of Glasswing Ventures says they “have the potential to help us solve our thorniest technical challenges” — including supply chains that may be too dependent on one particular provider ― by using artificial intelligence to “increase resiliency,” Seseri says.

Robots to address labor strains. Robots are now getting cheap enough, and the software that controls them good enough, to take on lots of new tasks, says Maia Heymann of Converge Venture Partners. She says that while warehouses and logistics companies have been at the forefront of robotics usage in the past few years, “many other industries like manufacturing, agriculture, and construction are seriously pursuing next-generation automation, particularly as they deal with severe labor shortages.”

Better virtual offices. Bob Mason of Argon Ventures recalls working with the ad agency Chiat/Day in the mid-1990s. Cofounder Jay Chiat at the time was trying to create a “virtual office” in which employees would be assigned a laptop, phone — and no permanent desk. “I find it incredible the clarity of vision he had 30 years ago,” Mason says. Mason was helping to build the software that would support that more fluid work model, dubbed Oxygen, which included shared online work environments and avatars to indicate when someone was online, and which digital space they were active in. But even today, with millions of people using videoconferencing technology like Zoom and messaging systems like Slack, “something is still missing,” Argon says. “I’m hoping to find a team to rebuild some of the magic we started, and then abandoned, 30 years ago. The principles that Jay Chiat set out to establish are likely the basic building blocks of the modern corporation.”

Insurance everywhere. When you book a flight or a vacation house online, often you’re presented with the option to insure that purchase as part of the checkout process. Lily Lyman of Underscore.vc says that more companies in different industries — from shipping to construction to car sales to financial services — will be able to offer insurance on a transaction “in a seamless, even invisible way.” And new kinds of insurance carriers, she predicts, “will have different datasets on consumer behavior than traditional insurers, making underwriting faster and creating more personalized, predictive policies.” Less paperwork, and potentially lower prices based on me as an individual — not some vast pool of people with different behavior patterns? Sounds great.

Tech for remote and hybrid health care delivery. Delivering more health care services at home will be a big part of our future, says Rob Biederman of venture capital firm Asymmetric Capital Partners, which launched this fall with $150 million to invest. That shift will require “a whole host of new digital connectors” and infrastructure to connect monitoring or diagnostic technologies used at home — like a blood pressure cuff or pulse oximeter — with the big data systems used at hospitals and diagnostic labs. Lyman at Underscore agrees: “This shift is exciting,” she says, “because it can relieve pressure on centralized, monolithic healthcare systems,” and it may even place more focus on preventative medicine. “But there’s a lot to build to realize this potential,” Lyman says. “This is a clear opportunity for Boston as a healthcare innovation hub.”

Blockchain plus physical. TJ Mahony of Vinyl says he’s using the term “multi-dimensional commerce” to describe what will happen when a shoe brand or musician pairs a real-world purchase — like shoes or a concert ticket — with a digital item that exists on the blockchain (often called an NFT, or non-fungible token.) While the concert experience is transitory, a one-of-a-kind photo or audio clip from that night might have sentimental value for you — and it could become a collectible with increasing value over time.

Neobanks. Adrian Mendoza of Mendoza Ventures says that he’s interested in new banks that lead with their website and mobile app — rather than by opening branches all around town. As one example, he cites Chime, a San Francisco startup that may be on a path to go public in 2022, according to reports. “There will be a new generation of ‘neobanks’ focused more on underrepresented groups and providing access to financial products to Latino, Black, and LGBT communities,” Mendoza says.

Software that predicts what goes next. If you use Gmail, you may have noticed it now tries to predict what you are likely to type next — based on data from what millions of other users have typed in the past. Drew Volpe of First Star Ventures says he’s been testing out technology called Copilot from GitHub, which tries to predict what software code should come next, based on what you’ve already written. “It’s scarily good at helping you fill in the details of what you’re doing,” he says. “Next year, I’m looking for a lot of similar assistant applications in all sorts of domains: helping lawyers draft contracts, financial analysts write reports, etcetera.”

Benefits and human resources services for DAOs. Decentralized autonomous organizations, or DAOs, are a new kind of entity that brings people together to work on a common project — you know, sort of like the company you work for. Often, they’re developing new apps related to blockchain technology, but recently a DAO was in the news for bringing together a group that attempted to buy an original copy of the US Constitution at auction. Giuseppe Stuto of 186 Ventures says that these DAOs may need to purchase insurance, pay contributors regularly, or provide benefits like 401ks or healthcare. Stuto believes that more people might consider working full-time for a DAO if those “missing ingredients” are supplied.

Scott Kirsner can be reached at kirsner@pobox.com. Follow him on Twitter @ScottKirsner.