In a nutshell
- Iris.ai, co-founded by Bulgarian Viktor Botev, has secured over €7.6M in funding from Bulgarian mezzanine fund Silverline Capital and the European Innovation Council (EIC).
- The investment will be used to further develop RSpace, their flagship product, improve processes, and expand the team.
Their background story
Iris.ai is a provider of an AI engine for scientific text understanding. The company was established in 2015 by Anita Schjøll Abildgaard and Victor Botev, who has worked as a Research Engineer in AI at Chalmers University of Technology.
The company is building its own platform that offers a search engine for scientific literature using AI. The tool helps both individual researchers and large corporate clients with R&D departments, aiming to assist them in developing new products and innovative solutions.
According to the company’s data, they have now 30 B2B clients. The Researcher Workspace or RSpace has transitioned from beta to its full version in the autumn of 2023.
Why it matters
The huge amount of research that is published poses a significant challenge for R&D departments across businesses. Since 1996, it is estimated that over 64M academic papers have been published, with an increasing rate of new articles each year.
With its generative AI module that produces text with its own scientific language and additional machine learning models, Iris.ai focuses on tackling this challenge. Currently, Iris.ai’s team is developing the first web-based AI assistant. Botev, the company’s CTO, highlights its value in research tasks with a need for a desktop version.
In their own words
“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. We’ve onboarded a range of new clients successfully using our RSpace toolsuite for research in diverse areas like material science, food science, medical, biotech, agriculture, chemistry, automotive, and cosmetics,” Anita Schjøll Abildgaard, CEO and co-founder of Iris.ai.
Investor’s perspective
“We believe in the team in its mission to empower researchers to achieve ground-breaking innovation with the help of proprietary AI tools. The team has proven its capabilities to stand out in a rapidly evolving field through a combination of exceptional technical knowledge and scalable go-to-market strategy, while also focusing on data privacy and fact-based AI knowledge,” shared Evgeny Angelov from Silverline Capital.
