After more than one year in stealth mode, the not-so-secret creature of co-founders Jim Crowley, Jennifer Lum and Jack Crowley is officially stepping into the spotlight.
Forge.AI, an analytics and artificial intelligence company that was one of BostInno's startups to watch this year, announced on Thursday that they closed $11 million in Series A funding.
The round was led by Boston-based Underscore VC with participation from Accomplice, Boston Seed Capital, Imagination Capital and Project 11 Ventures. The money will be used to accelerate hiring, product development and go-to-market activities.
The company was founded in 2017 by former Skyhook Wireless CEO Jim Crowley, Adelphic co-founder Jennifer Lum and former MITRE senior principal AI engineer Jack Crowley.
"We enable teams to... apply their energies to the actual analysis versus drowning with intense ‘data wrangling’ challenges associated with unstructured data," said Jim Crowley, CEO and co-founder of Forge AI, in a press release.
Take sources such as news reports, social media, financial reports and SEC filings. Before being analyzed, they need to be transformed in structured event feeds that data science and engineering teams can apply directly into their company’s analytical infrastructure.
Like assistant cooks do in any professional kitchen, Forge AI is basically preparing the ingredients so that chefs -- or, in their case, professional analysts -- can start cooking right away. The company streamlines the prep work thanks to both natural language understanding technologies and its proprietary self-learning knowledge graph.
In a guest post last year, Crowley wrote that the future of artificial intelligence will be fueled by unstructured data: "Just as the coal used by industrial power plants was the result of a complex mining, production and supply chain process, the data that will be used as fuel also needs to go through its own complex assembly line and supply chain process."
Forge AI is initially focused on financial services and the public sector. One of its first customers is investment advisor The Vanguard Group.
In August this year, Forge.AI hired a director of AI engineering, Nick Brachet, who was recently head of engineering at another analytics company, OM1. Currently, Forge.AI has 18 employees and is hiring hiring AI and machine learning researchers and engineers.
