Iris.ai, a leading European scientific AI startup, has raised €7.64M in a Series A funding round. The investment, led by Silverline Capital and the European Innovation Council (EIC) Accelerator Fund, brings Iris.ai’s total funding to €16M. This latest injection of capital will support the company’s continued growth and innovation in AI-assisted scientific research and contribute to a dynamic European AI ecosystem.
Addressing the challenge of research overload
Iris.ai addresses a critical problem faced by research and development departments across organisations: the overwhelming volume of published research. By combining its proprietary scientific language models, developed over eight years, with a generative AI module, Iris.ai significantly reduces the potential for hallucinations and can accurately categorise, navigate, summarise, and systematise data from academic papers, patents, and technical documentation. This allows organisations to gain actionable insights at scale, essential for staying at the forefront of scientific knowledge.
Investment from top-tier partners
Silverline Capital, a pioneering European growth equity firm, led the funding round. The EIC Accelerator Fund, which previously backed Iris.ai in January 2023, matched Silverline’s contribution.
“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.”
Investor confidence and future prospects
Evgeny Angelov from Silverline Capital expressed strong support for Iris.ai’s mission: “We believe in the team in its mission to empower researchers to achieve ground-breaking innovation with the help of proprietary AI tools. 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 the new funding, Iris.ai plans to further develop its flagship RSpace solution. In 2023, the company enhanced RSpace to measure the factual accuracy of its outputs. The new investment will help 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.”
About Iris.ai
Headquartered in Oslo, Norway, Iris.ai is a world-leading and award-winning AI engine for scientific text understanding. Co-founded by serial entrepreneurs Anita Schjøll Abildgaard and Jacobo Elosua, alongside AI researcher Victor Botev, Iris.ai boasts a cross-European team at the forefront of AI applied to scientific text. The company’s RSpace solution provides smart search, reading list analysis, auto-generated summaries, autonomous data extraction, and systematisation of scientific data. Iris.ai helps clients from corporate R&D departments to university researchers unlock cutting-edge scientific insights.
Iris.ai’s algorithms excel in text similarity, tabular data extraction, domain-specific entity representation learning, and entity disambiguation and linking. These capabilities allow the creation of a comprehensive knowledge graph for users to learn from and interact with, pushing the boundaries of scientific and technical text analysis.
Since its inception, Iris.ai has achieved notable milestones, including securing a top ten spot in the IBM Watson AI for Good XPRIZE and participating in prominent accelerators like five hundred Startups and Founders Factory. The company has also been featured in leading publications such as HuffPost, Nature, and VentureBeat, establishing itself as a pioneer in AI for scientific research.
