Paris-based Monk raises €2.1 million to expand its AI-based car damage inspection system
Summary
French AI startup Monk, a unique system for car damage detection, has closed a €2.1 million seed round led by Iris Capital, alongside Plug and Play and key business angels including Patrick Sayer (former CEO of Eurazeo), Yannis Yahiaoui (founder of Adot), and Arthur Waller (founder of PriceMatch and Pennylane). Monk was founded in 2019 when Aboubakr Laraki (CEO) and Fayçal Slaoui (CTO), both specialized in AI and image recognition, met and shared the conviction that the market of AI-based damages detection was still at its earliest stage, requiring an expert approach. “Among all the solutions we’ve tested to automatically detect damage on vehicles from photos provided by our users, not only did Monk eclipse the competition but their results also exceeded by far our expectations” said P. Beret, VP of Risk Getaround. While the company is only starting its sales outreach, this new funding round will support Monk’s R&D programme, the recruitment of new team members, especially data scientists, and its business expansion across Europe. We’ve been lucky to quickly deploy our product in other contexts and build high quality customer relationships that we aim at consolidating and developing in the coming months.