Explosion.AI receives investment for the first time

The VC Signalfire provides six million US dollars, in return for which the investor receives a five percent stake in the start-up.

Explosion.AI is actually profitable. But in order to implement their current project well, the Berliners are now raising six million US dollars. In return, investor Signalfire receives five percent of the company and the option to acquire a further five percent for twelve million US dollars. Signalfire's Oana Olteanu is also joining the start-up's board of directors.

Explosion is a software company that develops tools for AI, machine learning and natural language processing. "Our goal is to make developers more productive," says co-founder Ines Montani about the young company, which was launched in 2016. Explosion has built up the open source library Spacy, for example, which has been downloaded 40 million times to date.

The current project that is now receiving financial support is Prodigy Teams. It is part of Prodigy, a software that helps with data collection but can be modified by the developers. One of the aims of the new function is to enable collaboration between developers.

Montani, who is CEO of Explosion, founded the company together with Matthew Honnibal, who owns 51% of the start-up. She owns 34 percent. Today, 17 employees work for Explosion, but this figure is set to rise to 20 by the end of the year.