- NuMind announced that it has raised $3 million.
NuMind – a Y Combinator Summer 2022 alum and the company behind a software tool to create custom NLP models – recently launched out of private beta and announced its $3 million in seed funding. And using large language models (LLMs) and a proprietary “Interactive AI Development” learning paradigm, the NuMind solution enables all companies – even ones with no expertise – to quickly create machine learning models for performing tasks like analyzing sentiment, detecting topics, moderating content, and creating chatbots.
This $3 million seed investment was led by Flybridge. And additional funding was provided by Brazil-based big_bets, Carya Ventures, the Pioneer Fund, Velocity Ventures, Sharpstone Capital, and Y Combinator. And NuMind’s initial customers are developing custom models for medical coding, legal report review, user feedback analysis, and connecting resumes with job postings for a recruitment firm.
The NLP models designed by NuMind’s first customers were developed much faster than by using traditional methods – up to a factor of 10. And at the end of the project, companies own their models.
NuMind’s Interactive AI Development paradigm is considered similar to how people are taught – with an interactive process of questions, answers, and explanations – but doing this between a person and the machine. And this type of learning is more natural and efficient, eliminates labeling large volumes of data, and enables faster creation of personalized models.
NuMind offers:
— Reduction of labeling effort through the use of LLMs
— Automatic machine learning to automatically determine the best models
— Active learning to only label the most important documents
— Labeling interface
— Live performance report to quickly identify the strengths and weaknesses of models as the project progresses
—Multilingual models for avoiding any need for translation
—Full ownership of models so you can put them in production any way you want
NuMind was founded by two cousins: Etienne Bernard and Samuel Bernard.
— Etienne: MIT postdoc, former head of ML at Wolfram Research, and the author of “Introduction to Machine Learning.”
— Samuel: Former CTO of Make.org, a platform that galvanizes citizens to propose solutions to public issues.
NuMind’s team of seasoned professionals is split between Paris and Boston. And early customers are based in Brazil, France, and the United States.
Here is a video demo of how the platform works:
KEY QUOTES:
“We are living a revolution thanks to large language models such as GPT-4, but tools to take advantage of them are not mature yet. Tackling applications such as content moderation or sentiment analysis still requires ML experts and an intense labeling effort. Our goal at NuMind is to make this revolution accessible to all, starting with language understanding. It’s a game changer in terms of speed and efficiency for all the companies needing this type of AI.”
“Up to now there were two ways to teach computers: either by programming or by giving them many examples. I see LLMs as the key to unlock this third way that we call Interactive AI Development.”
— Etienne Bernard, CEO, NuMind
“The NuMind founders recognized how LLMs could be leveraged as part of a platform to drive textual understanding in an easy-to-use, accessible manner so developers could speed the creation and deployment of NLP models. Now organizations can maximize the potential of NLP, building better applications and improving experiences.”
“Given the depth of this insight and the breadth of the market opportunity, we were thrilled to invest and help them realize this vision.”
—Chip Hazard, co-founder and general partner, Flybridge
