Montréal startup’s backers include Panache, Inovia, and Real Ventures.
Led by a team with a decade of experience building artificial intelligence (AI) and deep technology products, Montréal-based HumanFirst aims to “make working with natural language data natural.”
HumanFirst has closed $5 million CAD in seed funding to date. The startup has secured this amount via three smaller, simple agreement for future equity (SAFE) rounds over an unspecified period of time.
Citing the team’s AI expertise, Panache partner Scott Loong believes HumanFirst is “well-positioned” to help enterprises optimize their data.
Per HumanFirst, Panache Ventures led the financing, which also saw participation from Inovia Capital, Real Ventures, BoxOne Ventures, and angels including Kevin Mahaffey.
According to HumanFirst co-founder and CEO Gregory Whiteside, conversational data is typically difficult to understand and make useful. HumanFirst aims to help change that with its low-code “natural language data productivity suite,” which is designed to help firms turn that data into business insights and custom AI more easily and cost-effectively.
“HumanFirst’s data-centric approach to simplifying and improving AI models for both technical and non-technical users is unprecedented,” Panache Ventures partner Scott Loong said in a statement. “Their technology allows enterprises to discover and operationalize business and customer insights in ways that have not been possible before with scaling conversational datasets.”
Whiteside and CTO Mathieu Rene—who both previously worked at Intel and PasswordBox—founded HumanFirst in 2017. Today, the startup helps clients like last-mile delivery firm Intelcom turn their unstructured text and conversational data into customizable training datasets and business insights.
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Citing Whiteside’s and the HumanFirst team’s AI expertise, Loong added that he believes HumanFirst is “well-positioned” to help enterprises optimize their data.
As the broader venture capital market has cooled, investment in AI-related companies has picked up. Between recent raises by more established AI firms like BenchSci and MindBridge to funding rounds for emerging startups like Shakudo and Reworkd alike, the sector has been a bright spot amid the economic downturn.
HumanFirst plans to use this capital to enhance its tech and add more customers. To get there, the company intends to double its workforce by 2024.
Feature image courtesy HumanFirst.
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