CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Gamalon today announced the first artificial intelligence system that can process natural language and then explain what ideas are present and how they are organized. Using Gamalon’s Idea Learning® technology, one person or a small group can understand what millions of people or customers are saying, and provide individualized responses and experiences.
Existing “black box” machine learning approaches to natural language are able to summarize by extracting statistically significant text or to categorize by following human-categorized examples, but these systems have not been able to structure, organize, and assemble compositions of ideas and sentiments from text, and then communicate this learned structure of ideas to people.
“Gamalon’s mission is to accelerate human understanding by combining human and machine learning. It’s easy enough for a business analyst to get started providing return on investment right away. When Gamalon’s Idea Learning technology reads large amounts of text, and forms ideas, the AI becomes an extension of you -- allowing you to read and respond to huge volumes of messages,” said Ben Vigoda, Gamalon’s Founder and CEO. “In the hands of a data scientist Gamalon can also be a sophisticated machine learning tool to perform data prep on many different sources of unstructured enterprise natural language - you can set it up to populate a target table or schema from the text.”
This technology breakthrough has driven further investment. Gamalon raised a $20 million Series A funding with lead investor Intel Capital joined by .406 Ventures and Omidyar Technology Ventures. Existing investors Boston Seed Capital, Felicis Ventures and Rivas Capital also participated in the round. Other Gamalon investors include Andy Bechtolsheim, Steve Blank, Ivan Chong, Adam D’Angelo, Georges Harik, and Raymie Stata.
“The powerful advances we’re seeing in machine learning are being enabled by diversification of compute infrastructures and fueled by the fast-growing volumes of complex, free-form text,” said Naveen Rao, corporate vice president and general manager of the Artificial Intelligence Products Group at Intel Corporation. “We want enterprises of all levels of AI capability to take full advantage of this growing volume and complexity of data. We think Gamalon’s approach can help users better understand billions of customer communications, customize individual responses, and take action to better serve those customers.”
Gamalon is already used by Fortune 500 enterprises across automotive, finance, insurance, manufacturing and telecommunications to turn millions of free-form customer messages and communication, including survey, phone transcripts, and trouble tickets, into actionable data to improve customer experience and retention. Larry Locascio, Senior Manager of Global Client Services at Avaya, has deployed the Gamalon system to audit and analyze their reseller partners. “We had previously tried manual approaches that didn’t work very well and took a lot of time to complete. Gamalon’s approach gave us accurate data overnight. We’re now able to scale our audit process from 40 or 50 resellers once per year to 30 to 40 per quarter.”
406 Ventures and Omidyar Technology Ventures were also excited to participate in the Series A. “Gamalon has built a platform based on fundamental breakthroughs in machine learning. Its system learns orders of magnitude faster than the state of the art approaches, is auditable and is easily extendable to specific domains. Gamalon takes advancements in the space to another level,” said Todor Tashev, Managing Partner at Omidyar Technology Ventures. Graham Brooks, Partner at .406 Ventures added, “Their revolutionary technology is reflected in their customer base. We were blown away by the caliber of company that has turned to Gamalon to power critical customer-facing systems and are excited to be partnering with them to drive rapid enterprise expansion.”
The infusion of capital brings the total investment in Gamalon to more than $32 million including the largest single investment by the US Government in next generation machine learning over the past five years. The funding will allow Gamalon to continue to invest in R&D and to expand sales and marketing efforts to the enterprise. Vigoda added, “The Gamalon system will enable enterprises to improve customer experience and retention, and drive revenue by allowing enterprises to truly understand what their customers are saying and to take strategic action, as well as to immediately reply 1-to-1.”
About Gamalon
Gamalon uses artificial intelligence to help
companies drive action from the millions of customer communications they
receive, improving customer experience and retention. Gamalon’s
breakthrough platform represents the next wave in machine learning:
teaching computers actual ideas. Unlike rules-based systems or deep
learning techniques typical in most natural language solutions,
Gamalon's Idea Learning technology provides accurate, editable, and
explainable processing of customer messages and other free-form data.
Gamalon was founded in 2013 by Ben Vigoda, an MIT PhD with over 25 years
of AI experience. Gamalon received the largest grant DARPA has ever
given for development of next generation AI platforms and has been
recognized by the MIT Technology Review as one of the “50 Smartest
Companies” for 2017. Learn more by visiting www.gamalon.com.
About Intel Capital
Intel Capital invests in innovative
startups targeting artificial intelligence, autonomous driving, workload
accelerators, 5G connectivity, virtual reality and a wide range of other
disruptive technologies. Since 1991, Intel Capital has invested US $12.3
billion in over 1,530 companies worldwide, and more than 660 portfolio
companies have gone public or been acquired. Intel Capital curates
thousands of business development introductions each year between its
portfolio companies and the Global 2000. For more information on what
makes Intel Capital one of the world’s most powerful venture capital
firms, visit www.intelcapital.com
or follow @Intelcapital.
About .406 Ventures
.406 Ventures is an early stage
technology venture capital firm investing in enterprise technology
companies founded by visionary entrepreneurs. With just over $650M under
management, the .406 Ventures team is comprised of entrepreneurs and
operators who became investors to apply real world experience and strong
company-building skills to create value for entrepreneurs and LPs. The
firm leads first institutional investment rounds in market-changing IT
Security, HealthIT, Data/Analytics and Cloud Infrastructure companies
led by world-class operators, who move quickly and embody successful
entrepreneurial DNA with their passion, creativity and endurance. For
more information, please visit www.406ventures.com.
About Omidyar Technology Ventures
Omidyar Technology
Ventures (OTV) is a Silicon Valley-based venture capital firm created
and solely funded by eBay founder, technologist, and philanthropist
Pierre Omidyar. OTV looks to partner with founders pursuing big, bold
and transformative ideas. The firm invests in early and growth-stage
technology companies in enterprise software, AI & big data, consumer
services and marketplaces. For more information, please visit www.omidyarventures.com
or follow us at @OmidyarVentures.
