ScoutinScience, a Dutch company that uses AI to scout for technologies with market potential, announced that it has raised Seed funding from Lumana Invest. The funding amount has not been disclosed.
Lumana Invest is an investment firm that claims to be unique as it does not have a predetermined investment horizon.
Wim Smit, MD of Lumana Invest, says, “ScoutinScience has a strong AI application, which can make an important contribution to the ecosystem of spin-offs and startups. Increasing the output of science towards society is a wonderful contribution that ScoutinScience can make towards the future. This also makes science more sustainable.”
About ScoutinScience
Founded in 2020 by Gilles Meijer (also the co-founder of Golden Egg Check) and Menno Noorlander, ScoutinScience aims to use artificial intelligence to discover untapped study and business possibilities in research.
The company specialises in gathering, compiling, analysing, and rating scientific papers that have been acquired from a variety of public and private data sources.
ScoutinScience’s natural language processing (NLP) tools, which include BERT models, are used to determine each paper’s Business Potential Score (BPS), which assesses its technical transferability.
The Dutch startup says, “We utilise a tailor-made AI/ML pipeline for each scientific domain. The processing steps evaluate different aspects of the publications, for instance: the overall scientific/technological contribution, tech-transfer summary, predicted technology readiness level, or the exact sub-field and topics of the work.
“The extracted features are connected with other databases, for example, to assess the current industrial trends of the article’s subfield. Moreover, we embrace explainable AI so that our clients always get the relevant evidence to verify the results.”
Within the next five years, ScoutinScience hopes to double worldwide tech transfer production, resulting in twice as many spin-offs, industrial collaborations, and success stories.
Capital utilisation
ScoutinScience says it will use the money to expand its sales and development activities and accelerate its growth trajectory.
Gilles Meijer, CEO of ScoutinScience, says, “This investment is a major milestone for us, and we’re excited about the future of ScoutinScience. We look forward to expanding our reach into the international market, further developing our AI algorithm, and growing our team.”
