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Venture Capital News: Kyndi Secures $20M in Series B

2019-07-11
SAN MATEO, CA, Artificial intelligence company building the first Explainable AI platform, has raised $20 million in Series B funding led by Intel Capital.
Kyndi, the artificial intelligence company building the first Explainable AI platform, today announced that it raised $20 million in Series B funding led by Intel Capital, with participation from UL Ventures, PivotNorth Capital, and existing investors. The new funding will be used to expand the company's engineering and sales teams to meet growing customer demand in government, financial services and life sciences.

"As AI becomes an increasingly integral part of how organizations operate and make decisions, there is a growing realization that they can no longer rely on 'black box' solutions that lack the rationale behind how recommendations were determined," said Ryan Welsh, Founder and CEO of Kyndi. "Some of the leading organizations in government and the private sector are adopting Kyndi's Explainable AI platform because we provide actionable intelligence that's auditable and provides the reasoning behind every decision."

"Enterprises are turning to AI to take advantage of new opportunities and to solve pressing business problems, and we expect AI's use in business will continue to grow as the technology matures," said Nick Washburn, Senior Managing Director of Intel Capital. "Solutions like Kyndi's, which remove some of the mystery of AI technology, will continue to gain importance, and we look forward to helping them accelerate AI adoption and address the need for explainability." Investment Director Sunil M. Sanghavi led the investment for Intel Capital and will join Kyndi's board of directors.

Unlike traditional "black box" AI solutions, the Kyndi platform scores the provenance and origin of each document it processes, while helping organizations quickly find difficult-to-locate information within collections of documents - without requiring large, labeled data sets to train the system. In addition, Kyndi's Explainable AI software can be used in conjunction with robotic process automation (RPA) tools to analyze text and automate inefficient workflows.

"Kyndi was named an IDC Innovator because of their focus and innovation on 'Explainable AI' and the automatic creation of knowledge graphs to answer challenging questions from reams of unstructured data, and also because of the success their customers in government agencies and Fortune 500 pharmaceutical companies are having to quickly identify and locate hidden information," said David Schubmehl, Research Director, AI Software Platforms, IDC.

"We are thrilled to have been able to work closely with these founders to build a market-defining company," said Tim Connors, Founder and General Partner at PivotNorth Capital. "Kyndi's team is now solving customer problems that until recently were unsolvable. It's great to see good people working on important problems."

About Kyndi
Kyndi is an artificial intelligence company building the first Explainable AI platform for government, financial services and life sciences. Our product exists because organizations cannot use "black box" machine learning when they are required to explain the reason for any decision. Our mission is to amplify the productivity of knowledge workers globally.

Founded in 2014, the company was named to the CB Insights AI 100 for 2018, which includes the most promising 100 private companies working on groundbreaking artificial intelligence technology, and was named an IDC Innovator: AI Software Platforms, 2018. Based in Silicon Valley, Kyndi is backed by leading venture investors. Among the investors in Kyndi is Intel Capital, UL Ventures and PivotNorth. Customers include Fortune 500 pharmaceutical companies and government agencies. For more information, visit https://kyndi.com/ or follow @kynditech.

About Intel Capital
Intel Capital invests in innovative startups targeting artificial intelligence, autonomous vehicles, datacenter and cloud, 5G, next-generation compute and a wide range of other disruptive technologies. Since 1991, Intel Capital has invested US$12.5 billion in 1,554 companies worldwide, and 670 portfolio companies have gone public or participated in a merger or acquisition. Intel Capital curates thousands of business development introductions each year between its portfolio companies and the Global 2000. For more information on what makes Intel Capital one of the world's most powerful venture capital firms, visit www.intelcapital.com or follow @Intelcapital.

About UL Ventures
UL Ventures works with entrepreneurs and leading experts to develop solutions that ensure safety, security, sustainability and interoperability within new fields and technologies. The Ventures team provides capital, expertise and access to UL ecosystems so you can pursue innovation. For more information please visit https://ul.com/ventures.

About PivotNorth Capital
PivotNorth Capital works to be the first and most-trusted investor in world-class technologists solving problems of importance to society. The firm's founder, Tim Connors, has had billion dollar exits as an operator and as a VC both via M&A and IPO. PivotNorth is based in Menlo Park, Calif.
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