4.5 million euros for ThingsThinking

With its Semantha speech processing software, the Karlsruhe-based start-up is already supporting several large companies. The new seed funding is now intended to help the KIT spin-off develop the market.

AI startup ThingsThinking is getting early funding of 4.5 million euros. The company made the announcement on Monday. The round is led by Earlybird, with other undisclosed angel investors also in the mix.

The company is a spin-off of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). There, co-founders Sven Körner and Matthias Landhäußer laid the foundation for the speech processing software Semantha, with which ThingsThinking went to market in 2017. In addition to Körner and Landhäußer, the founding team also includes Georg Müller and Abdelmalik El Guesaoui.

According to the company, Semantha can process texts faster than most other programs with the help of AI. That same AI works without the training that would otherwise be required, making the software very broadly applicable, the company said. "Existing solutions are one-trick ponies, limited to single use cases. Semantha, on the other hand, can be quickly and easily applied to new and previously unknown tasks," explains Earlybird partner Henrik Brandis.

ThingsThinking's customers today include BASF, Hella and Gothaer Versicherungsbank. "This funding round enables us to extend our technological lead and tap the market faster," said ThingsThinking co-founder Georg Müller in light of the funding round.