Infosys, one of India’s leading IT companies, has recently been putting its $500 million Innovation Fund to good use. Just a week after its undisclosed investment in TidalScale, the company has today announced that it has pumped in DKK 14,920,000 (approx $2.13 million) in a Danish artificial intelligence startup ‘Unsilo’. This marks the company’s eleventh investment using the said fund.
Commenting on the investment, Ritika Suri, Executive VP & Global Head of Corporate Development & Ventures at Infosys, says
UNSILO have built an impressive semantic search engine with best-in-class text intelligence, which powers a range of advanced business processes. They join and expanding portfolio of innovative young companies from around the world that Infosys works with to help enterprises drive their digital transformation.
Based out of Aarhus, Denmark, Unsilo was founded by ex-Apple(or Siri.com) product design head Mads Rydahl and his friend Thomas Laursen in 2012. The primary aim behind this project was to build out a platform that sees patterns across scientific research and make it easily discoverable and accessible to those required.
Unsilo makes this possible with the help of natural language processing (NLP) techniques which enables the system to analyse massive amounts of text and break it down into silos of information – segregated under specific terminologies related to that topic. One can use the semantic-based search engine developed by them to search for relevant articles, reports and presentations across different industries and scientific fields.
In addition, Unsilo maintains a robust database of consistent terminology and useful ontologies which are updated on a regular basis. The company identifies a newly published document, the system automatically imports and connects it to the full corpus. This has, however, only been made possible because of its partnerships in academic publishing, intellectual property, and regulatory content.
Commenting on the same, Jan-Erik de Boer, CIO at Springer Nature, one of its primary partner, says,
Using UNSILO’s fully automated content enrichment technology, we can identify the most descriptive concepts and phrases within any document in our content portfolio, and provide more valuable reading suggestions, even across domains with a highly variable terminology.
The primary aim of this partnership, as stated in the official statement, is to extend the latter’s artificial intelligence and machine learning technology to its global clients. This will enable Infosys’ clients to better streamline their workflow using text analysis techniques developed by the research team at Unsilo. The company already delivers workflow and decision support tools for editors, researchers, sales personel, and end-user services.
Thomas Laursen, chief executive at UNSILO also shares his views on being funded and partnering with Infosys. He says,
We are very excited about the partnership with Infosys. Making sense of any large amount of unstructured text is a huge challenge for many industries. Pairing our ground-breaking technology with Infosys’ deep client relationships and strong capabilities in project delivery and go-to-market will give us a unique opportunity to bring our services to several new industries and expand globally far more quickly.
Prior to this, Infosys has pumped in capital into numerous startups in the country and outside. These include a $4 million investment in Israeli cloud computing startup Cloudyn, $15 million in Stellaris Venture Partners, $3 million in US-Based wearabls Startup WHOOP, and $2 million into air monitoring techmaker AirWiz, among others.It has recently also made numerous acquisitions.
If you take a close look at the Indian IT giant’s investments, Infosys has recently been focusing on cloud and enterprise sector startups. And it is now also supporting the future growth of machine learning startups with this investment.
