Ex-Google DeepMind leaders bring Reliant AI out of stealth with $15.4-million CAD seed round
Summary
Montr\xe9al and Berlin, Germany-based data processing software startup Reliant AI has officially launched out of stealth and announced it has raised $15.4 million CAD ($11.3 million USD) in seed funding.The round was co-led by Inovia Capital and Seattle-based Tola Capital, with participation from angel investor and former Cisco chief strategy officer Mike Volpi. The startup was co-founded by CEO Karl Moritz Hermann, chief scientific officer Marc Bellemare, and head of commercial Richard Schlegel. BellemareHermann and Bellemare were previously senior research scientists at DeepMind, the AI research lab of Google, according to their LinkedIn pages.Prior to joining Google, Hermann co-founded and led Dark Blue Labs, which was acquired by DeepMind in 2014.Bellemare is also a Google Brain alum, has worked at Montreal AI institute Mila, and is an AI chair of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, which is leading part of the implementation of the Pan-Canadian Artificial Intelligence Strategy. Schlegel, for his part, was once a director at EY-Parthenon, the global strategy consulting arm of Ernst & Young.Reliant AIs first product, Reliant Tabular, is designed to help life science analysts find scientific evidence for their decisions through automated systematic reviews, asset scans, analyses, and a data platform.The sheer amount of menial labor involved in data-intensive industries today means that many highly skilled professionals are focused on wrangling data, rather than solving complex issues, Hermann said in a statement. A spokesperson for Reliant AI told BetaKit the company is currently developing the application with select partners, is seeing recurring usage of the platform, and is looking to expand to a substantially larger customer base later this year.