Skymind is an artificial intelligence platform developed by Y Combinator. Its main goal is to promote deep learning and improve the means of it for enterprises. The latest step to pursuing this goal was the announcement it made about having raised $11.5 million. Some of the participants of this Series A round were TransLink Capital (the leader of the program), as well as Sumitomo’s subsidiary Presidio Ventures, ServiceNow, GovTech Fund, etc.
After all, some of the contributors to the creation of Skymind joined the round, including Tencent, Y Combinator, etc. So the final amount raised was $17.9M. While we might not know how the funds will be used yet, the presence of TransLink Capital in the list of the contributors gives us a piece of information.
Skymind’s CEO Chris Nicholson is sure that Asian market opens a plethora of opportunities nowadays, and one of TransLink’s important goals is to develop clients all throughout Asia. If they unite, they may create a new bridge between Asia and North America, improving both deep learning and major client acquisition.
Besides, they are already working with ServiceNow, who back their funds up this time as well. So the number of technologies they can develop and implement together is considerable. Also, Sumitomo’s subsidiary can help Skymind greatly in establishing within the Asian market.
A Look from the Other Side
The majority of progressive businesses realize that they have or will have to adapt their software and services to artificial intelligence. A lot of them also find obstacles in doing it simply due to the lack of knowledge. This is when Skymind comes in to teach them how to improve themselves with the help of AI.
Its SKIL framework, aside from other features, is a great playground for developers, where they can introduce scenarios and check whether they’re working. So Skymind can easily erase the gap between implementing AI tools and data scientists who struggle to understand this.
Mutual Benefits
Chris Nicolson also stated that the two main priorities or almost any service are customer experience and efficiency. Both work with data and AI can help them create, store, erase, and archive this data much faster that any person or server could.
Skymind is on the right path to achieving its goal. Aside from this round and the potential it has, the company has created one of the best and most demanded open-source tools for testing AI in Java. They also help establish more deep learning frameworks.
