Canadian Artificial Intelligence Company Element AI Receives $102M In Funding

The artificial intelligence market is still in its relatively early stages, but a player in the market has received a large amount of funding. Element AI, an AI company based in Montreal, announced Wednesday it had received $102 million in Series A funding.

Element AI operates both as an incubator for AI development and as a consulting firm-like organization for companies that want to integrate AI applications into their day-to-day operations. The company, which was co-founded by noted machine learning researcher Yoshua Bengio, received its large funding round from firms and sources including Intel Capital and NVIDIA.

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The company, which was originally founded in October, plans to use the round to bolster its staff, internal development and potentially to invest in projects it helps to incubate. Element AI plans to hire 250 additional staffers by the end of the year. In a statement announcing the investment, Element AI CEO Jean-François Gagné said the investment round reflects venture confidence in the company’s goals.

“Artificial Intelligence is a ‘must have’ capability for global companies,” Gagné said. “Without it, they are competitively impaired if not at grave risk of being obsoleted in place. Seasoned AI investors at DCVC understood this, and supported us to democratize the AI firepower reserved today for only the largest of tech corporations.”

For Element AI, this round is the latest sign of confidence in the company’s fast growth. As VentureBeat previously noted, the company received an undisclosed amount in seed investment from Microsoft Ventures late last year.

“Element AI is doing amazing work enabling AI for a wide variety of industries, leveraging NVIDIA’s deep learning platform,” Jeff Herbst, vice president of Business Development at NVIDIA, said in a statement. “Element AI will benefit by continuing to leverage NVIDIA’s high-performance GPUs and software at large scale to solve some of the world’s most challenging issues.”

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In the coming year, Element AI also looks to ramp up its development in other areas. As the CBC noted, Element AI’s consulting side has already finished 10 projects for clients that have included using AI to help a Japanese semiconductor company improve its production quality and rates. Its incubator division also plans to have around 20 companies working with Element AI within the next year.

While AI isn’t necessarily as much of a consumer-facing future technology like augmented or virtual reality, the potential of the platform has made it a significant area of investment for tech companies. Within the past year, companies like Google and Microsoft have ramped up their research in the field.

Part of this is the possible ubiquity that AI could present. As with virtual assistants like Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa, stronger AI is aimed at allowing applications to become smarter at analyzing and predicting from available data. Element AI aims to bring this focus to AI in the enterprise and corporate space.