Canadian Element AI attracts almost all specialized IT investors. Launched in 2016, the team declared its goal as connecting machine learning solutions with business. And that can’t help but generate interest.
AI can do a lot of interesting things, but the problem often arises in their practical application. It’s great that an algorithm can unmistakably identify a deer in a photo, but how do you make money from that? Businesses have quite a few case studies, but they all have a number of peculiarities that make theoretical solutions applied in practice not look so great anymore.
Element AI is in the business of packaging all current machine learning advances into products that businesses can use. And it’s already working in a number of areas.
History
Element AI was founded in Jovtni 2016 by Jean-François Gagné and co-founders Yoshua Bengio , Yenne Martel, Nicolas Chapados, and Philippe Beaudoin together with Jean-Sebastien Cournoyer of Montreal-based venture capital fund Real Ventures. At the beginning of 2017, the company acquired the entire team of the machine learning database with open source code. It then secured 102 million US dollars from US investors in a Series A round led by San Francisco venture capital fund Data Collective and Microsoft Ventures.
In March 2018, the Canadian government granted a loan of up to 5 million Canadian dollars to Element AI to create 900 new jobs. Later, they held a conference about the impact of piecewise intelligence, at which Justin Trudeau and Munir Majubi convened a global group to study the impact of piecewise intelligence. In chestnut 2018, Element AI also partnered with Amnesty International and published a study that measured online harassment of women in politics and journalism on Twitter.
Element AI has partnered with GIC, Singapore University of Management, Port of Montreal, LG Electronics, among others. At the Port of Montreal, Element AI worked on calculating how long it takes for freight carriers to wait to drop off or pick up goods at the port.
Underwriting Partner’s first standalone product, software for the insurance workflow using piece intellect, was released in early 2019. In chestni 2019, they released Knowledge Scout, a platform for managing datasets in manufacturing companies.
On October 30, 2020, ServiceNow, a California-based IT services company, announced the signing of an agreement to acquire Element AI. The company ran out of money and options and was sold for 230 million US dollars, dismissing the majority of employees who had expired stock options.