Stabekk-based startup Iris.ai receives €2.4 million of funding in grants and up to €12M in equity investments from the 2022 EIC Fund. Founded in 2015, the startup offers an award-winning AI engine for scientific text understanding. The company uses Natural Language Processing/Machine Learning to review massive collections of research papers or patents that allow users to find the right documents, extract all their key data or identify the most precise pieces of knowledge. Thanks to this latest investment, Iris will be able to take rapid steps in its mission to create a reliable AI-powered system for scientific research.
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 has a budget of €470 million to fund the most promising technologies across Europe and support European growth.
Iris.ai solves a major problem for researchers – that of the overwhelming volume of research being published. Finding relevant research is like finding a needle in a haystack, and as a result, researchers in both academia and industry are missing relevant published papers that could advance their knowledge or are simply wasting time reading irrelevant research. Iris.ai cuts the time required to carry out scientific research by using AI language models to categorize, navigate, summarize and systematize data from academic papers, patents and all other technical or research documentations. It’s already being used by hundreds of universities and companies – including Fortune 500 steelmaker ArcelorMittal – to eliminate the weeks and months spent manually wading through patents and research.
Iris.ai’ technology has the potential to enable unprecedented breakthroughs in European research through interdisciplinary scientific discovery against growing competition from the US and China. The EIC Jury responsible for reviewing Iris.ai’s application commented: “A strong AI/ML European player is of utmost importance for the EU, given the evident progress in US and Chinese-driven AI developments and the potential biases that could therefore be implemented in the algorithms.”
Iris.ai will use the investment for its core mission: making scientific research more actionable. As a fully horizontal platform, this funding will assist the company in accelerating interdisciplinary research across every field, mapping out the vast amount of research available and helping to broaden researchers’ understanding beyond their specific domains.
The EIC Jury concluded: “We believe that Iris.ai has huge potential, with the investment enabling them to benefit from ‘the horizontal’ competitive advantages of the product and expand into other market segments in the mid and longer term.”
Anita Schjøll Abildgaard, CEO and Co-founder of Iris.ai, commented, “When Iris.ai was founded in 2015, few people had heard of language models. Since then, the AI ecosystem has grown exponentially, and the concept of language models is common knowledge.
However, the current generation of large language models – including ChatGPT – don’t work for science today. They hallucinate, generate mistruths, and misunderstand scientific text due to a lack of domain-specific knowledge. What we’re doing differently is we are working on factuality validation, and injection of externally validated knowledge – creating a trustworthy system that can be relied upon for analyzing scientific research. Our research efforts are considerable, compared to other startups in our field.
Together with my two brilliant co-founders Victor Botev and Jacobo Elosua, we are delighted to be selected for the European Innovation Council Accelerator funding. It will allow us to ramp up the development of our technology and achieve our goal of building a complete AI researcher – AI tools and applications which allow humans to make sense of the totality of the world’s scientific knowledge.”
