Six months after raising USD7 million in seed funding, Paris-based data-centric AI training platform Kili Technology has raised USD25 million in Series A financing from London-based venture capital fund Balderton Capital and further commitment from initial investors, Serena Capital and Headline.
“Managing and transforming unstructured data into training-ready data involves complex workflows and collaboration between business users and data teams. Kili’s data infrastructure platform simplifies this by managing the entire data lifecycle, helping companies to save time and money. We were impressed by the combination of technical experience from Kili’s team and their capacity to execute at a fast pace,” says Bernard Liautaud, Managing Partner, Balderton
“It’s no coincidence Kili attracted a large Series A round just 6 months after raising its Seed. Today every industry has to incorporate AI models in their products to stay competitive. AI is made of code and data. When customers realized the high velocity and quality of the AI models made with Kili, the client portfolio immediately soared. The team built true market fit,” says Jonathan Userovici, Partner, Headline.
“Kili’s platform is critical and strategic for the AI market deployment and growth. We strongly believe that Kili is the cornerstone of all new architectures and we’re happy to support this ambition at Serena,” says Bertrand Diard, Venture Partner, Serena Capital.
Kili Technology also benefits from the support of successful SaaS & AI entrepreneurs, such as Olivier Pailhes (founder of Aircall), Dimitri Sirota (founder of BigID) and Chris Schagen (founder of Contentful).
Artificial Intelligence has started to transform all economic sectors to gain productivity and increase value creation. Yet, the vast majority of AI programs initiated by companies remain at the POC stage and do not go into production because of siloed AI training processes.
“For the last 40 years AI related research has focused on model preparation, resulting in 0.1 per cent or 0.01 per cent increase of the model performance. Whereas focusing on data enables faster iterations to increase the model’s performance by many percentage points.
AI expert Andrew Ng says: “80 per cent of machine learning work is spent on data preparation, thus ensuring data quality is the major task of AI teams”.
“Kili Technology solution enables all companies implementing AI to enter into this new paradigm,” says François-Xavier Leduc, CEO and co-founder of Kili Technology.
Kili Technology starts from companies’ raw data (contracts, customer emails, medical images, video, recorded conversations, aerial images from UAVs or satellites) to turn it into valuable transformative AI applications across all industries.
It created the first data-centric AI training platform to iterate faster on the AI training and improvement cycle in order to boost AI applications. The solution is used by hundreds of AI-powered scale-up and data-science teams of large companies from various industries to address multiple AI use-cases:
document processing automation to increase productivity in the banking industry,
chatbot supervision to increase CRM satisfaction rate of a luxury goods company,
medical imaging analysis for early bladder cancer detection,
defect detection on production lines of a manufacturer,
control of shopping carts to decrease the loss rate of a retailer.
Over the past six months, Kili Technology has exceeded targets, increasing dramatically its client’ portfolio in France and abroad (Europe, US and Asia), taking positions in all industries (bank and insurance, defense, manufacturing, retail, healthcare). This exponential growth reflects the development potential of Kili Technology in the booming AI market.
“Kili Technology’s strength lies in the perfection of its technology. Our solution integrates state of the art AI annotation technology, such as interactive segmentation that reduces by 50 per cent data annotation time and reaches 94 per cent precision. These features enable productivity gains by simplifying and speeding up annotation tasks,” explains Edouard d’Archimbaud, CTO and cofounder of Kili Technology.
