Iris.ai, a provider of a world-leading and award-winning AI engine for scientific text understanding, has announced its latest funding round, with an investment of €7.64 million. 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.
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”
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.
“We believe in the team in its mission to empower researches to achieve ground-breaking innovation with the help of proprietary AI tools,” added 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.”