Canadian AI player raises $102m Series A for Asia push

US venture capital firm Data Collective led the round with additional participation from Fidelity Investments Canada, Intel Capital, Microsoft Ventures, Real Ventures, National Bank of Canada, Development Bank of Canada and US visual computing technology company Nvidia. A number of large international sovereign wealth funds also contributed.

The company will use the capital to expand its Asian marketing by beginning operations in Japan, Korea and Singapore. Its first Asian office is planned to be established in Japan during the third quarter, with the Singapore base opening later in the year as a regional hub for Southeast Asia. The funding will also be used to consolidate the company’s position in Canada.

Element AI was co-founded by serial entrepreneurs Jean-Francois Gagnee and Nicolas Chapados as well as Yoshua Bengio, a pioneer of deep learning technology and head of the Montreal Institute of Learning Algorithms. The company describes its business as a problem-solving service for global organizations that urgently need to use AI to outperform their competitors. Customers operate in fields including cybersecurity, manufacturing, logistics and transportation, and robotics. 

"The most serious problems facing global industry and government today involve too much complex and rapidly changing data for the cognitive capacity of even large numbers of human experts working together," Matt Ocko, managing partner at Data Collective, said in a statement. "These groups -- and the customers and citizens they serve -- need intelligent systems that can work in concert with them to field that scale and complexity.” 

Tencent is investing as part of its AI Labs program, which launched last year to serve the AI-related needs of the company’s diversified businesses. AI Labs' main areas of focus are content, social, online games and cloud services. 

Last year, Tencent contributed to a $15 million round led by China’s Advantech Capital for US-based AI and machine learning developer Petuum. The company focuses on processing and integrating data from sources such as social media, consumer profiles, electronic healthcare records and sensor logs.

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• Topics
• North America
• North Asia
• Southeast Asia
• Technology
• Early-stage
• Asia
• Japan
• South Korea
• Singapore
• Canada
• Tencent
• Intel Capital