Computers are pretty smart, but understanding language is complicated.
When you consider that just 15 words can express over 10 billion ideas, it’s easy to grasp why computers struggle to make sense of the countless charts, trouble tickets, surveys and product reviews that companies produce every single day. But that’s exactly what many artificial intelligence and machine learning companies are trying to do.
Gamalon, a Cambridge-based startup, says that it’s finally solved this problem with its artificial intelligence system, which can process natural language and then explain what ideas are present and how they are organized. This technology breakthrough helped drive a $20 million investment led by Intel Capital this week.
The funding will allow Gamalon to continue investing in research and development, as well as expand its sales and marketing efforts.
“When Gamalon’s idea-learning technology reads large amounts of text and forms ideas, the AI becomes an extension of you — allowing you to read and respond to huge volumes of messages,” said Ben Vigoda, Gamalon’s founder and CEO, in a statement. “In the hands of a data scientist, Gamalon can also be a sophisticated machine learning tool to perform data prep on many different sources of unstructured enterprise natural language.”
This breakthrough is significant because companies with overwhelming amounts of data can use the idea-learning technology to understand what millions of customers are saying and provide individualized responses.
“We want enterprises of all levels of AI capability to take full advantage of this growing volume and complexity of data,” said Naveen Rao, corporate vice president and general manager of the artificial intelligence products group at Intel Corporation. “We think Gamalon’s approach can help users better understand billions of customer communications, customize individual responses, and take action to better serve those customers.”
Gamalon, which has received more than $32 million in investments to date, is already used by dozens of Fortune 500 companies across industries like finance, insurance, manufacturing and automotive. Gamalon helps these enterprises transform millions of free-form customer messages like surveys, phone transcripts and trouble tickets into actionable data to improve their customers’ experiences.
Other investors in the round included .406 Ventures and Omidyar Technology Ventures, as well as existing investors Boston Seed Capital, Felicis Ventures and Rivas Capital.
