Cambridge startup Gamalon Inc. on Tuesday raised $20 million in a Series A round meant to fuel its effort to sell artificially intelligent text analysis software to companies.
The funding round was led by Intel Capital, the investment wing of Intel Corp. (Nasdaq: INTC). Boston-based .406 Ventures and California-based Omidyar Technology Ventures, both previous investors, also participated.
Intel Capital announced 12 new investments, totaling $72 million, into startups that the company thinks will "shape the future of artificial intelligence, the future of the cloud and the Internet of Things, and the future of silicon," according to a statement from Intel Capital president Wendell Brooks.
Gamalon is co-founded by CEO Ben Vigoda, who has a PhD in machine learning from MIT and previously sold a semiconductor startup to Analog Devices. The company launched last year with a "probabilistic programming" approach to machine learning that promised to parse large chunks of unstructured text — also called "natural language" — more accurately and with a fraction of the computing power required by other approaches.
Now, Gamalon is turning the technology into a product called Idea Learning that analyzes the text from customer interactions across channels like email, online surveys, or Facebook chat, allowing companies to respond quickly and personally to each customer.
“Gamalon’s mission is to accelerate human understanding by combining human and machine learning," Vigoda said in a press release. "When Gamalon’s Idea Learning technology reads large amounts of text, and forms ideas, the AI becomes an extension of you -- allowing you to read and respond to huge volumes of messages.”
Gamalon received $7.7 million in grants from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. The company also raised a $4.45 million seed round that included Boston Seed Capital's Nicole Stata and other long-time tech executives.
| Rank | Prior Rank | Company |
|---|---|---|
1 | 1 | Intarcia Therapeutics |
2 | 2 | WuXi NextCODE |
3 | 3 | Indigo |
