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AI startup AYLIEN announces €2m investment and the creation of 70 jobs

Deep Learning and advanced Natural Language Processing are the core technologies at AYLIEN, a startup that today announced new investment totaling €2 million ($2.35 million) and the creation of 70 jobs.

 

The investment round has been led by the Atlantic Bridge University Fund, which invests in companies built from world-class research, along with existing investors SOSV and Enterprise Ireland also joined this funding round. The investment will be used by AYLIEN to grow its Dublin team, secure its first hires in the United States, expand its product offering and make its cutting-edge technologies available to more global enterprises.

 

The new positions, supported by the Department of Business, Enterprise and Innovation through Enterprise Ireland are across many areas of the business and include opportunities for Software Engineering, Product Management, Technology, Sales, Marketing, Finance and HR.

 

Welcoming the announcement An Tánaiste and Minister for Business, Enterprise and Innovation, Frances Fitzgerald TD said “I am delighted to join Parsa Ghaffari and his team at AYLIEN for the announcement of 70 new high value jobs. Parsa moved to Dublin with the support of Enterprise Ireland under the Start Up Entrepreneur Programme and AYLIEN has been continuously supported by Enterprise Ireland as a High Potential Start-up client. Today’s jobs and funding announcement, paves the way for AYLIEN to significantly scale its business globally. My Department, through Enterprise Ireland looks forward to continued engagement with AYLIEN.’’

 

AYLIEN’s tools make it easy to understand vast amounts of human-generated text using Deep Learning and advanced Natural Language Processing. The company’s products are used in complex data analytics projects and solutions by global enterprises, namely Sony, Microsoft, and Deloitte.

 

Having recently reached a milestone of 30,000 users, 2017 sees the company launching its new Text Analysis Platform, which allows users to easily create custom text analysis models powered by AYLIEN’s Machine Learning and Deep Learning technology. This is the third product offering from the company, building on a Text Analysis API (launched in 2014) and a News API (launched in 2016) and is set for public release in Q4 2017.

 

The B2B SaaS company is now growing rapidly in a market set to be worth $9bn by 2020, alongside incumbents such as IBM Watson and newcomers like Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Cognitive Services.

 

AYLIEN has a strong research and development focus, with an active research team who have successfully published papers at international NLP and Machine Learning conferences such as EMNLP, NIPS, and IEEE. Essential to its success, AYLIEN has leveraged the strength of Irish research to build several strategic research relationships with leading academics in Irish universities such as National University of Ireland Galway (NUIG), University College Dublin (UCD) and Trinity College Dublin (TCD).

 

Commenting on the announcement, Parsa Ghaffari, Founder & CEO, AYLIEN, said “We are very excited to announce that we have partnered with Atlantic Bridge on our mission to enable developers and enterprises to make sense of textual content and unstructured data. We have had a great year so far, with phenomenal growth in traction and team size, along with signing up key customers and pushing the boundaries of scientific research in Natural Language Processing and Deep Learning. We are also taking a major step towards realising our product vision by introducing our latest offering, the Text Analysis Platform, which is currently in private beta and will be rolled out over the next couple of months.

 

We are proud to be backed by three of the most respected and forward-thinking institutional investors in Ireland, and we look forward to leveraging their knowledge, knowhow and network to further expand and grow AYLIEN.”

 

Helen McBreen, Investment Director, Atlantic Bridge, said “I am delighted to join the AYLIEN Board and be an active investor and partner to the team who we believe has developed cutting edge natural language processing and artificial intelligence technologies. The strength of research at the core of AYLIEN’s technology is an impressive example of how companies can leverage the outputs of Irish research to create unique solutions that solve complex problem for customers globally”.

 

Joe Healy, Manager High Potential Start Up Dept (ICT), Enterprise Ireland, said “AYLIEN is a highly innovative Irish start up making strong commercial and technical progress, having developed world leading technology in the Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing space. The company has demonstrated global ambition, and Enterprise Ireland looks forward to continuing to support the company as they accelerate the scaling of their business across international markets”

 

Cyril Ebersweiler, General Partner, SOSV; Managing Director, HAX, said "AYLIEN is at the forefront of its industry and has attracted a lot of attention over the past few months. We are very happy to be joined by leading investors in which the company can count on to reach a global scale. We look forward to see AYLIEN impact the relation that humans have with technology, fundamentally".

 

ENDS

 

Contact:

 

AYLIEN

Parsa Ghaffari, CEO & Founder

parsa@aylien.com / +353-1-5983-168

 

About AYLIEN:

 

AYLIEN is a leading provider of Text Analysis solutions based in Dublin, Ireland. We provide an easy way for developers and enterprises to bring the power of Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning to the applications and solutions they build.

 

About Atlantic Bridge:

 

Atlantic Bridge is a European Growth Technology Firm which invests in high growth technology companies and accelerates the scale up of these companies by applying its proprietary Bridge Model into the US, Middle East and Chinese markets. The Firm has investment teams, offices and extensive networks in Dublin, London, Palo Alto, Muscat and Beijing. Atlantic Bridge is focused on investments in high growth and disruptive sectors and such as Artificial Intelligence, Computer Visioning, Robotics, Machine Learning, Enterprise Software and IoT.

 

About SOSV:

 

SOSV is a $250M venture capital fund focused on accelerating over 150 startups every year. SOSV is a global fund with >$250M assets under management and a staff of nearly 50 operating world-renowned accelerators in the areas of hardware, software, biology, food, robotics, medical devices, transportation, green energy, and beyond.

 

About Enterprise Ireland:

 

Enterprise Ireland is the Government agency in Ireland responsible for supporting Irish businesses in the manufacturing and internationally traded service sectors. Specifically, Enterprise Ireland helps businesses to start-up, innovate, and ultimately to achieve global success.

Fact sheet (not all of these will be mentioned in the press release):

 

○     February 2014 - AYLIEN launches Text Analysis API publicly

○     September 2014 - AYLIEN launches Text Analysis Add-on for Google Sheets

○     March 2015 - AYLIEN launches Image Tagging API in collaboration with Imagga

○     March 2016 - AYLIEN raises €580,000 in funding from SOSV and Enterprise Ireland

○     April 2016 - AYLIEN launches News API publicly

  • Notable past press mentions:

○     February 2017 - AYLIEN’s Parsa Ghaffari: ‘I came to Ireland for the tech, stayed for the weather’ (SiliconRepublic)

○     May 2016 - New to the Parish: From sanctions in Iran to a start-up in IrelandIrish Times)

○     April 2016 - AYLIEN launches news analysis API powered by its deep learning tech (TechCrunch)

○     March 2016 - Irish tech start-up AYLIEN secures new funding (Irish Times)

○     October 2015 - RapidMiner's Big Data Predictive Analytics Goes Textual With AYLIEN (Forbes)

○     April 2014 - Tech start-up of the week: AYLIEN (SiliconRepublic)

○     March 2014 - Irish startup AYLIEN is the everyman of natural-language processing (Gigaom)

○     February 2014 - AYLIEN Launches Text-Analysis API To Help Developers Extract Meaning From Documents (TechCrunch)