Iris.ai, a company from Oslo that makes an AI tool for understanding scientific texts, announced that it has secured €7.64M in a Series A round of funding. With this round, the company has now raised a total capital of €16M.
European growth equity firm Silverline Capital led Iris.ai’s current funding round. The European Innovation Council (EIC) Accelerator Fund is matching Silverline Capital’s contribution. The EIC Accelerator Fund, a major startup grant from the EIC, also supported Iris.ai in January 2023.
Evgeny Angelov from Silverline Capital, says, “We believe in the team in its mission to empower researches 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.”
Research discovery with AI
Founded in 2015 by Anita Schjøll Abildgaard, Victor Botev and Jacobo Elosua, Iris.ai is an AI engine for scientific text understanding that supports knowledge processing needs for research.
The company claims to address a “major” challenge for R&D departments – the “overwhelming” volume of new research being published.
Iris.ai uses its scientific language and machine learning models with a generative AI module to produce “high-quality” text. This method minimises errors and effectively categorises, summarises, and organises information from academic papers, patents, and other technical documents.
Capital utilisation
This funding will help Iris.ai grow and keep innovating in AI-assisted scientific research and contribute to the European AI ecosystem.
The company plans to enhance its main product, the RSpace.
In 2023, Iris.ai created a tool for RSpace to check the factual accuracy of its outputs. The tool offers smart search, filters, reading list analysis, summaries, and organising data. The funds will help improve this accuracy further, making research processes easier for researchers at companies and universities.
Anita Schjøll Abildgaard, CEO and co-founder of Iris.ai, says, “This investment is a testament to the momentum we’ve gained over the previous year. 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.”
“We are grateful for the support and confidence shown by our investors. This funding will allow us to progress our mission to make sense of all the world’s scientific research – and make it actionable.”
Brief about the investors
The EIC is a programme in Europe that finds, develops, and helps new technologies grow. In its third year as a full European Union fund, the EIC had €470M to support the “most promising” technologies across Europe and help European businesses grow.
Silverline Capital is a growth equity fund that offers financing to “outstanding” businesses aiming to lead their industries. The fund’s portfolio includes investments in various sectors like AI, e-commerce, circular economy, insurance, and BPO.
Silverline Capital receives co-financing from the European Structural and Investment Funds through the operational programme “Innovation and Competitiveness 2014-2020”, which is managed by the Fund Manager of Financial Instruments in Bulgaria.
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