Sherpa.ai, leading Artificial Intelligence services company, closed a financing round of 8.5 million dollars, which serves to meet the objective of accelerating its growth and expanding into Europe and the rest of the world.
The potential of this new Artificial Intelligence platform that was announced by the company some months ago, along with agreements for the use of Sherpa.ai’s AI services has convinced existing investors Marcelo Gigliani (Managing partner of Apax Digital), Alex Cruz, (Chairman of British Airways) or Mundi Ventures, in the company to increase their capital, and have attracted new investors, like Ekarpen.
Recently, Sherpa.ai have announced the strategic agreement with the leading Spanish-language media company, PRISA (El País, Huffington post, AS, Cinco Días, etc), for the use of Sherpa.ai platform to improve their results and audience experience.
Apart from that, Sherpa.ai indicated they have already closed new agreements for the use of Sherpa.ai’s technology with multinationals from strategic sectors as Telecommunications, Retail or Insurance, which will be announced soon.
In July, Sherpa.ai launched the world-leading AI services platform, which was presented in Sherpa Keynote 2020:
The platform covers three areas of Artificial Intelligence, AI applied to data privacy, making it the most complete platform on the market applied to data privacy. For example, in security, biometrics, or the health sector, allowing advances in the diagnosis and treatment of illnesses to be made, without sharing private patient data.
Recommendation and predictive AI, which gives companies, like media companies, digital content companies, or businesses in the retail sector, the ability to personalize content and make recommendations to users about products and services that match their interests and preferences. This technology also has applications with a lot of impact in industry, for example, in predictive maintenance, and even in energy efficiency; or any other process that companies want to improve. Conversational AI, for example, so that different companies can use Sherpa.ai’s technology to make it so that their products, cars, machines, applications, or websites have a personalized assistant that is controlled by voice.
Xabi Uribe-Etxebarria, founder and CEO of Sherpa.ai, stated “we are very pleased to have achieved this round, and about the reception that our new AI platform is receiving on the market. Many companies have come to us, looking to reach an agreement and improve their services or results, thanks to our technology. We are making important alliances, which help to promote our international growth.”
Relevant new-hires
To do so, the Basque company is opting for signing top-level figures. A few months ago, it announced the incorporation of Celestino García, ex Corporate Vice President of Samsung, as the Vice President of Business Development at Sherpa.ai. García joined the team that other big talents are a part of, such as Tom Gruber, founder and ex CTO of Siri; and Joanna Hoffman, who was the former Marketing Director at Apple and considered Steve Jobs’ right-hand person.
Sherpa.ai’s Response to COVID-19
Sherpa.ai has also helped to contain the COVID-19 outbreak. To do so, the company developed a platform that has been used by the Department of Health which, among other things, is able to predict the future needs of Intensive Care Units (ICUs). The platform developed is capable of predicting the number of ICU beds needed, by territory, in the next seven days. This tool is also able to recognize patterns and trends in the virus, as well as identify data that is vitally important to health services, like trends in infection rates and future outbreaks, among other functionalities. The platform uses Machine Learning algorithms, along with others, in order to make predictions.