Euclidean Capital, which is a family office owned by hedge fund billionaire James Simons, is leading a $20 million investment in Peltarion AB.
Peltarion AB is a Swedish company whose software platform allows companies to utilize artificial intelligence (AI).
According to the startup’s CEO and Co-founder Luka Crnkovic-Friis, Peltarion will hit a valuation of $110 million thanks to the new investment.
Aside from the billionaire’s family office, the round of funding includes the participation of existing investors such as FAM and EQT Ventures.
Simons, a renowned mathematician and ex-code breaker who established hedge fund Renaissance Capital, boasts a net worth of about $16.5 billion.
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Swedish publication DI was the first to report about the investment.
Crnkovic-Friis revealed that Peltarion, which has its headquarters in Stockholm and offices in Barcelona, Oslo, and London, plans to open an office on the East Coast of the United States in the oncoming months
The startup’s software platform allows companies to create algorithms by leveraging neural networks, a type of machine learning (ML) that is somewhat based on a human’s brain.
Peltarion is one of the firms that are aiming at assisting companies in simplifying their AI development efforts, even if they have inadequate coding skills or the relevant experience.
Petuum, a Pennsylvania-based entity that was established by computer scientists Eric Xing, is among Peltarion’s competitors.
Back in September 2018, Microsoft Corp. purchased California-based startup Lobe that developed a graphical programming interface designed for computer-vision tasks.
International Business Machines Corp., Alphabet Inc.’s, Amazon.com Inc., Microsoft, and Facebook Inc. have started providing pre-trained machine learning toolkits and algorithms.
This effort is propelled by the desire to convince such enterprises to purchase their cloud-computing services.
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However, Crnkovic-Friis asserted that the tools that such entities provide are still more advanced for inexperienced users and are mostly not customizable or strong enough for application in real business use cases.
“A lot of these things are fine if you want to build a proof of concept, but they won’t work if you need to use them every day for critical business functions,” he said.
Peltarion was established back in 2004 as a specialized consultancy that assisted the likes of General Electric, NASA, and Tesla is using neural networks.
Back in 2016, Peltarion changed its customized projects to create a broader software platform that is intended for delivering AI to as many enterprises as possible.
Since then, customers have utilized the company’s products in building several different AI applications, particularly from systems that assist doctors in segmenting cancer tumors to algorithms that aid farmers in optimizing crop yields.
Crnkovic-Friis claimed that the growth of the company’s software platform since its inception back in June 2018 has been “good” even though most companies were not ready to utilize the neural network.
“More often than not, they need a bit of help,” he said. “A deep-learning platform, the gap there, maybe too big for them to bridge on their own.”
Deep-learning is the type of neural network-based machine learning that is mainly utilized nowadays by companies and includes algorithms that can learn from data.
