VentureFuel Visionary and Venture of the Year

Join us as we honor the 2023 Visionary and Venture of the Year. Nominated and voted on by their peers, these are the change agents embracing new opportunities to drive outsized results. They are intent on blazing new paths, discovering inventive solutions, and powering the future. Visionary of the Year: Marty Guay, Vice President of Business Development, Stanley Black & Decker With over three decades experience as a corporate innovator, Marty Guay has spent the past six years working with startups, academia, venture capital and global corporations to create business value opportunities for Stanley Black & Decker, a worldwide leader in Tools and Outdoor. At Stanley Black & Decker, Guay is responsible for the inception of the company’s accelerator program where he successfully connects startups with technological and commercial relationships inside the organization and throughout global ecosystems. Guay sits on the advisory boards of multiple startups and serves as a board member of the state of Connecticut Governor’s Workforce Council and as a liaison to the Business Roundtable. In addition to these roles, Guay also oversees the company’s global philanthropy program that is focused on closing the skilled trades gap through its Grow the Trades program. Venture of the Year: Inworld AI, represented by Co-founder, Kylan Gibbs Inworld AI, led by a team of conversational AI pioneers and experts, uses advanced AI to build interactive characters whose personalities, thoughts, memories, and behaviors are designed to emulate social human interaction. Founded in 2021, Inworld is a recent graduate of the Comcast NBCUniversal LIFT Labs Generative AI Accelerator run in partnership with VentureFuel. Last month, Inworld announced a multi-year partnership with Microsoft to develop AI toolsets to assist and empower creators in dialogue, story, and quest design. Kylan Gibbs has a background in turning advanced AI into products that naturally interact with humans. He came from DeepMind, where he led products for Conversational AI and Generative Models. Prior, Kylan worked on enterprise Machine Learning projects at Bain & Company. Kylan studied at the University of Cambridge and McGill University.