France’s AnotherBrain raises €19 million Series A for their “OrganicAI”.

Deep learning company AnotherBrain has announced the first closing of their Series A, to the tune of €19 million. The company announced this investment round was led by a consortium of public and private investors, including SEB Alliance, Robinson Technologies, and existing shareholders Alpha Intelligence Capital, Daphni and Cathay Capital. The firm expects the extension of the round to “close oversubscribed by mid-December”.

AnotherBrain has developed a unique technology, OrganicAI™, a deep learning artificial intelligence that mimics how the human brain learns and functions. In contrast to other AI-enabled technologies, OrganicAI™ does not rely on a corpus of big data for training. This design allows OrganicAI™ to operate at a lower cost and have fewer energy requirements compared to alternatives. OrganicAI™ is currently delivered as software, but the company plans to make the technology available soon on an AI-chip.

AnotherBrain’s founder, Bruno Maisonnier, said: “When we started AnotherBrain, we decided to push forward the limits of what is possible thanks to our AI which goes beyond current AI. Our technology doesn’t rely on huge databases of previous examples, but instead analyses what it perceives and therefore can explain its decisions. Our ambition it to build a powerful and human-friendly AI, acceptable to companies (certification) and consumers (privacy). The first commercial solutions are currently tested by Fortune 100 companies, with general availability in early 2020. Our technology has the power to make every sensor an intelligent sensor sending back interpretation of signals rather than the flow of raw data. This will allow the generalization of AnotherBrain’s approach, in particular helping cars achieve full autonomous driving (Level 5) by the middle of the next decade.”

Prior to founding AnotherBrain, Maisonnier was known as the serial innovator, founder and chairman of Aldebaran Robotics, the developer of humanoid robots Pepper and Nao. In 2015, Aldebaran Robotics was acquired by SoftBank Group.

AnotherBrain was founded and raised its first seed round of €11 million in 2017. This new announcement brings AnotherBrain’s total financing to date to €35 million. According to Francois-Xavier Meyer, VP Investments SEB Alliance: “We have followed the progress of AnotherBrain since its inception. The technology is genuinely breakthrough and will deliver benefits which traditional AI (Machine Learning) cannot, such as explainability, independence from the cloud (making it more private and secure), and reduced energy consumption. First initial customer deployments have demonstrated AnotherBrain’s strong potential in particular in the field of Industry 4.0”.

Currently, Paris-based AnotherBrain has 38 employees. According to the firm’s website, “Kindness and responsibility are at the heart of every person in our team to keep up with the challenges of AI today and tomorrow.”