Element AI closes $102 million Series A funding round led by DCVC and institutional investors.
Element AI, an artificial intelligence company delivering groundbreaking AI solutions, announced it has raised $102M USD, representing the largest Series A funding round for an artificial intelligence company in history. This funding will accelerate the company's capabilities and enable large-scale AI project investment internationally, solidifying Element AI's position as the largest global AI company in Canada and creating 250 jobs in the high tech sector by January 2018.
Element AI was co-founded in October 2016 by serial entrepreneurs Jean-François Gagné and Nicolas Chapados, and Yoshua Bengio, a co-father of deep learning technology. The company was established to empower industry with the massive scale of academic AI innovation that Bengio was driving at the Montreal Institute of Learning Algorithms (MILA), one of the three leading centers of AI research in the world. Together with MILA, Element AI pioneered a unique, non-exploitative model of academic cooperation that has been replicated to many other institutes, providing the company with insight, talent, and cutting-edge research that matches or exceeds even the largest tech corporations' reach and budgets.
Data Collective (DCVC) led the funding round with participation from Real Ventures, Development Bank of Canada, Fidelity Investments Canada, Hanwha Investment, Intel Capital, Microsoft Ventures, National Bank of Canada, NVIDIA, Tencent, and several of the world's largest sovereign wealth funds. This funding will enable Element AI to aggressively expand on a global scale, focusing on AI-powered solutions for customers in cybersecurity, fintech, manufacturing, logistics and transportation, and robotics.
According to Element AI CEO Jean-François Gagné, "Artificial Intelligence is a 'must have' capability for global companies. Without it, they are competitively impaired if not at grave risk of being obsoleted in place." He emphasized that "This historic round will help Element AI deliver profoundly powerful AI platforms for all, not just the few." DCVC Managing Partner Matt Ocko stated, "The most serious problems facing global industry and government today involve too much complex and rapidly changing data for the cognitive capacity of even large numbers of human experts working together," and noted that "We're proud to back Element AI and their team of world-class researchers and engineers, who are already solving multiple global-class problems." Intel's Naveen Rao, Vice President and General Manager of its Artificial Intelligence Products Group, commented that "Element AI has the intellectual horsepower to help us all advance artificial intelligence like never before," while NVIDIA's Jeff Herbst, Vice President of Business Development, stated that "Element AI will benefit by continuing to leverage NVIDIA's high performance GPUs and software at large scale to solve some of the world's most challenging issues."