European scientific AI startup Iris.ai raises €7.64million with its Series A funding round
The startup, which uses AI language models to accelerate scientific research processing, secures further funding from Silverline Partners and the EIC Accelerator, taking its total funding to €16.m with the latest raise
Oslo, Norway, May 29th – Iris.ai, provider of a world-leading and award-winning AI engine for scientific text understanding, has announced its latest funding round, with an investment of €7.64m. This investment will support the company’s continued growth and innovation in the field of AI-assisted scientific research, and contribute to a dynamic European AI ecosystem.
Iris.ai solves a major problem for research and development departments across organisations – that of the overwhelming volume of research being published. It combines its own scientific language and other machine learning models – developed in-house over eight years – with a generative AI module that generates high-quality text. This approach reduces the potential for hallucinations and can accurately categorize, navigate, summarize, and systematize data and facts from academic papers, patents, and all other technical or research documentation. Organisations reliant upon the latest scientific knowledge can easily gain actionable insights at scale.
Silverline Capital, a pioneering European growth equity firm, is the lead investor for this funding round. Its contribution is being matched by the European Innovation Council (EIC) Accelerator Fund, the flagship startup grant from the EIC, following previous backing from the Fund in January 2023.
“This investment is a testament to the momentum we’ve gained over the previous year,” said Anita Schjøll Abildgaard, CEO and co-founder of Iris.ai. “Since January of last year, we’ve overhauled our approach to take the best of generative AI and combine it with the domain expertise and accuracy of our own in-house scientific language models. We’ve onboarded a range of new clients successfully using our RSpace toolsuite for research in diverse areas like material science, food science, medical, biotech, agriculture, chemistry, automotive, and cosmetics”
“We believe in the team in its mission to empower researches to achieve ground-breaking innovation with the help of proprietary AI tools,” said Evgeny Angelov from Silverline Capital. “The team has proven its capabilities to stand out in a rapidly evolving field through a combination of exceptional technical knowledge and scalable go-to-market strategy, while also focusing on data privacy and fact-based AI knowledge. We are proud to support a European company with global goals.”
With this investment, Iris.ai plans to further develop its flagship offering, the RSpace. In 2023, Iris.ai developed a solution for the RSpace to measure the factual accuracy of its outputs and will use the investment to further increase the platform’s factual capabilities, enabling streamlined processes for researchers at corporations and universities.
“We are grateful for the support and confidence shown by our investors,” said Schjøll Abildgaard. “This funding will allow us to progress our mission to make sense of all the world’s scientific research – and make it actionable.”
About Iris.ai
Iris.ai is a world-leading and award-winning AI engine for scientific text understanding. Iris.ai is co-founded and run by serial founders Anita Schjøll Abildgaard and Jacobo Elosua alongside AI researcher Victor Botev, with a cross-European team around them. By now, the founders and the team have placed themselves at the very forefront of the field of AI on scientific text, with solid in-house research efforts on NLP.
It is a comprehensive platform for all research-related knowledge processing needs. Its RSpace solution provides smart search and a wide range of smart filters, reading list analysis, auto-generated summaries, autonomous extraction, and systematizing of data. The company helps clients from corporate R&D departments to university researchers unlock the latest scientific insights that are beyond human capabilities alone.
Iris.ai allows humans to focus on value creation, doing specialized, interdisciplinary field analysis to an above human level of accuracy. Its algorithms for text similarity, tabular data extraction, domain-specific entity representation learning, and entity disambiguation and linking measure up to the best in the world. Its machine builds a comprehensive knowledge graph containing all entities and their linkages to allow humans to learn from it, use it, and give feedback to the system. Applying these features to scientific and technical text is a complicated challenge few others can achieve.
In 2020, Iris.ai consolidated its impact-driven nature when it secured the top 10 in the ‘IBM Watson AI for Good XPRIZE’. The start-up has also been part of the 500 Startups (Nordic) and Founders Factory (London) accelerators and has been a finalist in TechCrunch Disrupt London, to name a few – and was started at Singularity University. In addition, on top of coverage in publications like HuffPost, Nature, and VentureBeat, Iris.ai has been featured in both Nature and Science Magazine as one of the leading companies worldwide for the AI exploration of scientific literature.
Find out more at https://iris.ai/.
About EIC
The European Innovation Council (EIC) is a flagship European program to identify, develop, and scale up breakthrough technologies. In its third year as a full-fledged EU fund, the EIC had a budget of €470 million to fund the most promising technologies across Europe and support European growth.
About Silverline Capital
Silverline Capital is a growth equity fund that provides mezzanine and equity financing to outstanding businesses with the potential to be industry leaders in their segments. The fund’s portfolio comprises investments in AI, e-commerce, circular economy, insurance and BPO. Silverline Capital is co-financed by the European Structural and Investment Funds under the operational program “Innovation and Competitiveness 2014-2020”, managed by the Fund Manager of Financial Instruments in Bulgaria