Karlsruhe-based deeptech AI startup thingsTHINKING has closed a €4.5 million funding round led by Earlybird and a group of renowned angel investors. With their platform semantha, the team at thingsTHINKING has taken textual processing to the next level – applying multi-modal processing while working out-of-the-box without the much dreaded training usually required for AI applications.
Dr. Hendrik Brandis, Co-founder and Partner at Earlybird said: “With semantha, domain experts can finally educate an AI system as if it were a co-worker – using just a few and simple examples. This allows for a divide-and-conquer approach for any type of text-related challenge with customers, where the domain experts can directly use the system in production while simply creating new solutions with the provided UI. This makes semantha® the fastest and most progressive platform in the market.”
Earlybird Principal Dr. Andre Retterath added: “semantha combines cutting edge natural language processing approaches in a unique way that provides immediate value for every customer. While existing solutions are “one-trick-ponies” that are purely trained and thus limited to very specific use cases, semantha can be easily adopted to new and so far unseen tasks. This is where standard NLP/AI approaches fail.”
Already serving a wide range of SaaS license customers from SMEs to enterprises like BASF, Hella, and Gothaer, semantha has been adopted by increasingly more partners who use the platform’s 150+ REST/API web services to create their own solutions.
Dr. Sven Körner, Dr. Mathias Landhäußer, Georg Müller, and Abdelmalik El Guesaoui founded thingsTHINKING in 2017 as a spin-off of the renowned Karlsruhe Institute of Technology where Sven and Mathias conducted NLP research with the software engineering research group since 2006. The publication and research track-record of the group spans all relevant conferences in the NLP and semantic processing space. Georg is a seasoned cloud software architect who worked for global players and led large developer teams before prompting Sven and Mathias to found a new company using their research results as a basis. Abdelmalik complements the founding team with his international product management experience in building real-world solutions from the research results and ideas.
“Bringing common sense to computers is our goal”, explained Sven. “As human knowledge-workers, we spend so much time with drudge work when it comes to texts of any kind”, says Mathias. “This is why we want semantha to be the perfect co-worker and play our part in the multi-billion dollar employee experience market,” added Abdelmalik.
“The current funding allows us to grow our technological advantage and market faster while supporting our international partners, like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft, and large RPA-Vendors, who are eager to use semantha for their customers,” added Georg.
