Deep Learning and advanced Natural Language Processing are the core technologies at AYLIEN, a startup that has announced new investment totaling €2 million and the creation of 70 jobs.
The investment round has been led by the Atlantic Bridge University Fund, along with existing investors SOS Ventures and Enterprise Ireland, who are also joining this funding round.
The company said the funding will be used to hire more staff, secure its first hires in the United States, expand its product offering and make its technologies available to more global enterprises.
The new positions include opportunities for Software Engineering, Product Management, Sales and Marketing.
AYLIEN’s products are used in complex data analytics projects and solutions by global enterprises such as Sony, Microsoft and Deloitte. With 30,000 users, this year the company launched its new Text Analysis Platform, which enables users to create custom text analysis models powered by AYLIEN’s technology.
In Association with
AYLIEN has forged strategic research relationships with academics in National University of Ireland Galway, University College Dublin and Trinity College Dublin.
Commenting on the announcement, Parsa Ghaffari, founder & CEO, commented: “We are very excited to announce that we have partnered with Atlantic Bridge on our mission to enable developers and enterprises to make sense of textual content and unstructured data.
“We have had a great year so far, with phenomenal growth in traction and team size, along with signing up key customers. We are also taking a major step towards realising our product vision by introducing our latest offering, the Text Analysis Platform, which is currently in private beta and will be rolled out over the next couple of months.”
In the latest funding round, taxpayers through Enterprise Ireland have invested €400,000. The agency previously invested €250,000 in the company in August 2016.
In the August 2017 funding round, Atlantic Bridge invested €1,050,000 while SOS Ventures invested €550,000, having previously ponied up €443,000.
In March 2016, Ghafffari and SOS Ventures were allotted shares in Aylien Ltd in a share for share purchase of shares in Aylien Inc, a company registered in Delaware, USA. The non-cash value of the consideration was €461,000.
Aylien Ltd booked a loss of €256,000 in 2016, bringing accumulated losses to €687,000. Eleven people were employed in the venture through 2016, up from seven people the year before.
Photo: Business minister Frances Fitzgerald with Parsa Ghaffari (left) and Joe Healy of Enterprise Ireland. (Pic: Finbarr O'Rourke)
