Explosion.AI receives investment for the first time

VC Signalfire is giving six million US dollars, and in return the investor will receive five percent of 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 gets five percent in the company and the option to buy another five percent for twelve million US dollars. Also, Signalfire's Oana Olteanu is moving into the startup's board.

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

The current project, into which the financial support is now flowing, is Prodigy Teams. It is part of Prodigy, a software that helps with data collection but can be modified by developers. One of the purposes of the new feature is to enable collaboration among each other.

Montani, who is CEO of Explosion, co-founded the company with Matthew Honnibal, who owns 51 percent of the startup. She owns 34 percent. There are 17 employees working for Explosion today, but the goal is to have 20 by the end of the year.