von • David Ferrucci, the AI researcher who led the team behind IBM Watson’s development has raised $60 million for his Elemental Cognition AI startup.
• Elemental Cognition provides two enterprise chatbot solutions tailored for various applications and is also developing a hybrid AI platform with LLMs and an AI-driven reasoning engine.
• Notable investors and advisors include Jim Breyer, Sam Palmisano, Greg Jensen and Geoff Yang.
AI Researcher Raises $60M for Startup
David Ferrucci, the artificial intelligence (AI) researcher who led the team behind IBM Watson’s development — the question-answering supercomputer developed by IBM — has raised nearly $60 million for his Elemental Cognition AI startup. The company provides two enterprise chatbot solutions, Cogent and Cora, which are tailored for diverse applications such as finance, interactive travel planning, and scientific research automation.
Elemental’s Hybrid AI Platform
Elemental Cognition highlights its distinctive hybrid AI platform that integrates large language models (LLMs) with an AI-driven reasoning engine to enhance precision and controlled responses. Moreover, Elemental is working on generative AI capabilities to power expert problem-solving intelligence and research & discovery applications.
Leadership Team & Investors
Among Elemental Cognition’s leadership team are former executives of IBM and Bridgewater including David Shepler, Eric Brown and Mike Barborak. Notable investors like Jim Breyer, Sam Palmisano, Greg Jensen and Geoff Yang have lent their support to the company as well as advisers.
Ferrucci’s Background
Ferrucci spent 18 years at IBM leading the Watson team from 2006 to 2012 when it famously won Jeopardy! showcasing its ability to understand natural language. Despite initial promise though, IBM ended up divesting its Watson Health unit in 2020 to Francisco Partners before introducing WatsonX studio aimed at training machine learning models this year instead.
Growing Investor Enthusiasm For AI Startups
Investor enthusiasm for startups in the field of artificial intelligence has been spurred by OpenAI’s ChatGPT popularity recently too – providing further impetus for growth within this space in general moving forward.
