REDWOOD CITY, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Yewno, maker of a new inference engine that mimics the human brain and provides an entirely new approach to knowledge discovery, has attracted a new international strategic investor that brings additional expertise in the publishing industry and an entré into Asia.
The new investor, Desmond Shum of GO VR LLC, is leading a $6.5 million funding infusion into Yewno’s Series A round, which now totals $16.5 million. Pacific Capital Group, the company’s prior investor, is also participating in the new round. “We are delighted to continue to support the growth of this project, the progress so far and the ongoing innovation is incredibly exciting. The ability to provide a panoramic view of knowledge is simply stunning,” said Silvio Scaglia, founder of Pacific Capital. The new funds will be used to further develop Yewno’s knowledge base and inference engine for roll out into additional vertical markets and geographies from early 2017.
“We are experiencing strong traction of the new Yewno for Education inference engine among leading universities around the world, and we’re preparing to expand into additional vertical markets,” said Ruggero Gramatica, chief executive officer and founder of Yewno. “Desmond Shum recognizes the potential of our solution in changing the way people explore knowledge by extracting insights and building inferences in multiple vertical markets, including publishing. His experience, participation and investment in our company will accelerate our plans tremendously.” Along with being publisher of a leading socioeconomic magazine in China, Mr. Shum is widely recognized as an accomplished investor in formative stage technology companies.
“Today, people in every walk of life and every profession and industry are hungry to know more and, at the same time, frustrated with simple, fragmented, incomplete answers and insight from traditional information services and search engines,” said Mr. Shum, who, along with his role in GO VR LLC is President of Aeropolis Group and Chairman of Ocean Pacific Investment Management. “Yewno solves this frustration head on by providing a new approach to knowledge discovery by mimicking the human brain.”
Mr. Shum was among the first generation of venture capital investors in China and invested in the first NASDAQ-listed technology company from that country. In addition to his proven investment track record, Mr. Shum is an honorary trustee of Tsinghua University, a member of the Beijing Municipal Committee of Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, a 2005 Henry Crown Fellow of the Aspen Institute and a Member of Aspen Global Leadership Network. He also is a dedicated philanthropist with endowments in various educational institutes in the US and China, including Harvard, Tsinghua and the China Europe International Business School in Shanghai.
Yewno announced its Yewno for Education inference engine in June with the participation of leading research universities including Harvard, MIT, NYU, Stanford, Stonehill College, University of California, Berkeley, the University of Michigan and the Bavarian State Library. In addition to a substantial content base for discovery from publishers and aggregators, each university can contribute to Yewno’s massive knowledge base that now exceeds more than 50 million vetted, quality items, some dating back nearly 200 years.
The company’s knowledge base is growing exponentially as more content is ingested from additional publishers, aggregators and universities globally. The result is a unique knowledge discovery platform where concepts are searched and clustered visually to resemble a human inferential cognitive process.
About Yewno
Founded in 2014, Yewno is helping people uncover the undiscovered through its new inference engine, which introduces an entirely new approach to knowledge discovery. Mimicking the human brain, the Yewno inference engine incorporates machine learning, cognitive science, neural networking, and computational linguistics into a highly visual solution to enhance human understanding by correlating concepts across vast volumes of text. The launch of its first vertical offering, Yewno for Education, serves as a unique service designed for scholars and students and is at use at leading academic and research libraries around the world, including Harvard, MIT and Stanford. Headquartered in Redwood City, CA, and with offices in London, Yewno is backed by leading investors including Pacific Capital and currently has numerous partnerships across top research universities, publishers and content aggregators worldwide.
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