Artificial Intelligence in the Nordics is witnessing a boom across Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Finland, with many new startups tackling challenges across navigation, healthcare, education, among others.
Traditional industries have not embraced AI fully, and it’s the young startups that are setting the course. While funding is scant, promising startups have been able to get the right backers.Here are six artificial intelligence applications from Nordic startups:
Iris.ai
Iris.ai, is a Norwegian startup, launched in 2015, has developed an AI Science Assistant, that helps scientists and researchers in seeking out insights in published scientific research, contributing to enhanced research productivity, via swifter research for academic and industrial R&D programs. The Iris AI Science Assistant helps in sifting through published research, patents, internal R&D content, enabling cross-disciplinary early stage research by going beyond limiting keywords, endless result lists and the biased citation.
Iris.ai leverages AI, in competing against Google Scholar.
The company recently launched the exclusive pre-sale for its AIUR tokens. The AIUR tokens support its Project AIUR - the project that allows scientists to semi-automate the time-consuming process of checking the factual base of any research hypothesis. Leveraging the latest AI and blockchain technology to assess and appraise the validity of a piece of scientific research, Project AIUR aims at fighting misinformation in science and aims to eventually fix the perverse incentives of the current scientific process.
AIUR tokens can be used to demand services from the knowledge validation tool and from directly linked third party services like Iris.ai's Premium Tools.
Baffin Bay Networks
Baffin Bay Networks is a cyber startup from Sweden that aims to disrupt cloud-based cybersecurity market. The company operates a global network of Threat Protection Centers that supports its clientele in facing cyber threats. The company offers up to 3 Tbps mitigation capacity with more than 11 Internet Exchange Points (IXP) and transit providers.
Baffin Bay Networks deploys an AI-enabled layered security approach to ward cyber threats. It raised $6.4 million Series A round led by European VC EQT Ventures and the capital will be used for further international expansion.
Furhat Robotics
Furhat Robotics is a Swedish conversational AI and Social Robotics startup that bring together state of the art speech software with facial animation to achieve social competence.
Furhat comes with a customizable silica mask that can be trained to mimic human expressions across any race and culture. The head is seated on a square base, communicating that it is clearly a machine, making it likeable and non-threatening.
Furhat is a foundational platform upon which others can build their own services, as it revolutionizes human-machine interface and opens up new tasks that require social skills for AI. Since its inception in 2014, Furhat has attracted >50 companies including giants like Merck, Intel, Honda, KPMG and Disney.
For Furhat, the use cases for its emotionally intelligent AI range from education to travel, and from elderly healthcare to cognitive therapy.
The company raised $2.5 million in seed funding from two of Europe’s most active early stage venture capital investors, Balderton Capital and LocalGlobe.
Mapillary
Mapillary is a collaborative street-level imagery platform for extracting map data at scale using computer vision. Image recognition software analyses the photos and automatically tags objects - collecting data that can be used by third parties.
Mapillary has built a database of 130 million images, and has released a free dataset of 25,000 street-level images from 190 countries, with pixel-level annotations that can be used to train automotive Artificial Intelligence systems.
Mapillary has now raised a $15 million series B round, led by BMW i Ventures, with participation by Samsung Catalyst Fund and NavInfo together with existing investors. The total funding in Mapillary stands close to $25 million.
Mapillary’s platform ensures the continued updating of street-level maps in high definition. In contrast to Google Maps' proprietary setup, the startup crowdsources its images to provide a real-time view of streets with object identification to boot.
Sana Labs
Founded in 2016, Sana Labs is an AI education tech startup from Sweden that applies recent breakthroughs in AI and machine learning to personalize education. Using Sana's machine learning platform, forward-thinking companies are able to personalize educational content based on student’s learning.
The Sana Labs AI platform learns from everything the student does in real time to determine an optimal learning approach personalized to them.
The digital education is yet untapped, and Sana Labs is one of the early pioneers in it.
Corti
Corti is a Danish healthcare startup that has developed an AI to help detect cardiac arrest cases faster and more accurately in real time when individuals call the official emergency number. The Corti AI is a digital assistant for dispatchers taking emergency calls. Corti uses automatic speech recognition to analyze the call in situations where every minute counts. Based on voice data from millions of previous calls, the AI looks for verbal and non-verbal signs of cardiac arrest, by analyzing like tone of voice and breathing patterns.
Corti is being rolled out across Europe in 2018.