Kili Technology, a Paris-based annotation tech startup, has just closed its first round of €5.7 million raised from venture capital funds Serena Capital and e.ventures, who invested alongside renowned business angels such as entrepreneurs Olivier Pomel (CEO Datadog), Nicolas Dessaigne (CEO Algolia), the founders of PeopleDoc, Stanislas de Bentzmann (CEO Devoteam) and Gus Robertson (CEO NGINX).
Founded in 2018, Kili Technology enables large companies to transform their raw data (which can include contracts, customer emails, medical images, video, aerial images from UAVs or satellites) into high-quality annotated data, ready for AI-driven projects.
Around 20,000 GB of information (in the form of images, text, video, sound, Lidar, Radar) are published every second, but the majority of this data remains raw data, which that cannot be processed by AI-based models. Leveraging its clients’ raw data, Kili Technology enables companies to quickly assemble training datasets, thereby allowing them to implement artificial intelligence projects.
François-Xavier Leduc, co-founder and CEO of Kili Technology said: “Without quality training data, there is no AI. Kili Technology has enabled our customers to successfully implement AI programmws and to double the number of AI projects initiated each year. Our investors understood we were among the few to offer an industrial solution for annotated data. They saw the incredible depth of our development prospects.”
In two years, Kili Technology has worked for several dozen companies in France, Europe, the US, and China. Kili Technology’s expertise applies to the banking/insurance, health, distribution, luxury goods, and defense industries. The company’s solution has been applied to various use cases such as document processing automation, chatbot supervision, medical imaging analysis, defect detection on production lines, control of shopping carts, and border control via satellite images.ç
“Most large companies now understand that they can leverage their data to build intelligence and turn it into a sustainable competitive moat, explained Marie Brayer, Partner at Serena. Inspired by GAFAs best practice, Kili Technology builds a new model for data and metadata management, provides these companies with an incredible tool to convert their investments into a business ROI, and takes a key position in the booming data industry. We were massively impressed by the team and its ability to execute, which is the first driver of our investment.”
“On the one hand, the amount of data available is sky-rocketing, on the other hand, corporates need to be more efficient by launching many Artificial Intelligence models. The founders of Kili Technology have the ambition to become the best platform to bridge the gap between the two and what they have achieved so far is very impressive,” commented Jonathan Userovici, partner at e.ventures.
