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The start-up has developed a platform to help organisations cut research times by making it quicker to find and summarise various research documents.
Iris.ai, a Norwegian start-up that has been backed by the EU, has received a fresh wave of funding to develop its research paper search platform.
The company raised €7.64m in a Series A funding round, backed by Silverline Partners and the European Innovation Council (EIC) Accelerator. The start-up said it has raised €16m to date thanks to the latest round.
Iris.ai has developed a platform called RSpace that uses AI language models to categorise, navigate and summarise various research documents, such as patents and academic papers. The start-up says this platform solves a major problem for researchers, who usually have to find relevant research amid a massive amount of data being published globally.
Iris.ai was selected in January 2023 by the EIC Accelerator for a €2.4m grant and up to €12m in equity investments. Anita Schjøll Abildgaard, CEO and co-founder of Iris.ai, said the latest investment is a “testament to the momentum we’ve gained” over the past 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,” Schjøll Abildgaard said. “We’ve onboarded a range of new clients successfully using our RSpace tool suite for research in diverse areas like material science, food science, medical, biotech, agriculture, chemistry, automotive and cosmetics.”
Iris.ai said it will use the latest funding to increase the factual capabilities of RSpace to provide streamlined processes for researchers at corporations and universities. The company said its platform has helped various organisations to cut down on research time.
“We are grateful for the support and confidence shown by our investors,” Schjøll Abildgaard said. “This funding will allow us to progress our mission to make sense of all the world’s scientific research – and make it actionable.”
In February 2023, Victor Botev – the CTO and co-founder of Iris.ai – spoke to SiliconRepublic.com about the AI industry and the challenges it faces, particularly for large language models.
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