« We started in April 2013. We want to build the first Big Data SaaS Solutions provider. This seed round will help us launch our first products in SaaS mode and to achieve our R&D plan. We also plan to set-up a part of the team in the US to get closer to our clients » François Goube, co-fondateur et CEO de Cogniteev
Bordeaux, 9th September 2014 – Big Data solutions provider Cogniteev is annonuncing a seed round with $650k raised from Aquiti. With this first round of funding, and the investment from the founders and the French subsidiaries, Cogniteev has more than a million euros to accelerate on its R&D plan. The company plans to build the first Big Data solutions Group in Europe.
François Goube, serial entrepreneur, and NLP Expert and former Exalead employee Tanguy Moal co-funded Cogniteev. Both believe Semantic and Big Data Technologies must cross paths to make sense of the tremendous volume of data available on the Web. Cogniteev is building ‘plug and play’ solutions for customers so that they don’t have to handle the pain of any Big Data project (infrastructure, scaling…). Cogniteev provides SaaS service for several market segments such as Onsite SEO Monitoring (Oncrawl) or Enterprise Search (Docido)
« We’ve looked at how the founders have scaled their technology in the last few months and the feedback from their first customers is pretty good. The team is one of the most talented we have seen in years and their experience will be a plus to create a Big Data Group » says Anthony Hillion, partner at Aquiti, the Bordeaux based VC firm leading the round.
Cogniteev’s technology rely on three main expertises :
- Crawling at web scale: Since 10 years, the co-founders have helped or built search engines. Cogniteev is able to crawl the web and social networks like Twitter on a nearly real-time basis
- Hadoop and AI: Besides its ability to mash-up and make sense of heterogeneous datasets Cogniteev is developing machine learning processes to make their apps real auto-learners. They revamped and built their stack on top of Hadoop and ElasticSearch.
- Semantic analysis: with over ten years working on Natural Language Processing issues, Tanguy Moal has helped Cogniteev achieve an entity detector able to recognize an entity in any type of datasets.
« At first we started with well-known datasets like Freebase.org, the technology is now able to classify and understand unknown entities by scoring what makes an entity belonging to a particular category. » says Tanguy.
« We don’t score links like Google does, we score relations between entities, which gives us the most accurate overview of how things are connected » adds CEO Francois Goube. « We are on a mission to make Big Data and Semantic analysis super easy. It’s a long run but our strategy is to build, field by field, one market after another ‘plug and play’ SaaS solutions. As all our products are based on the same plateform, we are able to scale really fast. »
In order to accelerate, the company plans to recruit more than ten new engineers in 2015 and to raise a series B in the next 18 months.
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Download the press release in french
