The team that led a Columbus machine-learning business to acquisition in three years is back, this time with a new AI-for-anyone startup that's raised $12.75 million.
CEO Ryan Sevey and CTO Jason Montgomery founded Mantium Inc. in January, after leaving the Ohio office of DataRobot, the Boston company that acquired their prior startup, Nexosis Inc.
Columbus-based Drive Capital LLC and Top Harvest Capital led the round. Adam Ghobargh, Top Harvest founder, was formerly a longtime executive of Google and its VC arm.
Mantium seeks to make artificial intelligence accessible to anybody – the website touts its platform as no more difficult than using a word processor.
Mantium has grown to 31 remote employees across nine countries. The website and regulatory filings list an office in Cincinnati, where Sevey incorporated the business – but a spokesman said the headquarters has moved to Columbus. Montgomery and most executives are in Columbus, and Sevey plans to move next year.
"Mantium is one of those companies where you get excited by the possibilities that the technology enables – and you’re equally excited by the team behind the tech,” Ghobargh said in a release. "Mantium is not only making AI easier to build with, they’re also making sure the future of AI has the appropriate safeguards."
The platform lets users plug into huge AI engines already on the market, and builds in automated security safeguards, so a user can quickly build anything from a song to analysis of patient records. Mantium itself built an orientation Slack bot for its quickly growing remote workforce.
The application opened Wednesday to general users for beta testing after several months of quiet testing by a select group.
Sevey was not available for comment.
"There is massive potential for innovation with AI, but we need to make it easier and faster for developers and creatives to get to deployment," he said in a release. "We’re going to see the next wave of technological breakthroughs come from artists and creatives who, with the power of Mantium, can now play and build with AI."
In a way, the new company advances the mission of the former startup.
Founded in 2015 in Westerville, Nexosis at first helped retailers better predict inventory levels. It expanded into other industries and uses, broadly helping corporate software developers plug machine-learning into their problem-solving.
DataRobot hired the entire 16-person company with the acquisition for undisclosed terms and kept the office, which had moved to Easton. Valued at $6.3 billion in a VC round this summer, DataRobot still lists Columbus as a location on its website.
It's common for entrepreneurs to stay with an acquirer to lead the transition, then leave to build again.
With Mantium, the founders are democratizing AI even more.
In a 2016 interview, Sevey told me, “We wanted to use machine learning for social good."
In this week's release, he said, "At Mantium, it’s our job as a collective to make sure AI advancements benefit humanity as a whole."
It's not the first time Cincinnati has lost a startup to Columbus. Physna Inc. — Cincinnati's "Google of 3D" and another Drive portfolio company — moved its headquarters to Ohio's capital city last year as well.
