SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Node, the first AI-powered discovery engine, announces that two renowned artificial intelligence experts have been added to the company’s leadership team to spearhead the development of Node’s next generation platform and revolutionize online information discovery.
The new appointments include Louis Monier as Chief Scientist and Jeffrey Johnson as Chief Technology Officer. Monier and Johnson are both well-recognized technology powerhouses who have played key roles in building industry-changing artificial intelligence technology for Fortune 100 companies. The new executives have been leading the development of Node’s next product phase that will revolutionize search by helping clients automatically discover valuable, relevant and timely information about people and companies. Both Monier and Johnson will report to Node Chief Executive Officer Falon Fatemi.
Node is also announcing $5 million in additional funding from Recruit Strategic Partners (RSP), WndrCo, David Brewer of Aragon Capital (former founder of search engine Inktomi), Linnea Roberts of GingerBread Capital, Falmouth Ventures, and Marc Weiss of Open Field Capital. The company has now raised $21.3 million to date. Existing investors include Mark Cuban, NEA, Avalon Ventures, Canaan Partners, Bee Partners, and Sway Ventures.
Node’s AI-powered discovery engine is the solution to data overload. In tandem with an unparalleled data layer of more than one billion people and companies, Node enables professionals across sales, marketing, recruiting, partnerships, and beyond to proactively identify the opportunities that can transform their business.
Monier joins Node from Airbnb where he was head of the home-sharing company’s Artificial Intelligence Lab and currently serves on the board of CrowdFlower. With over 30 search, NLP and data related patents to his name, Monier is widely recognized for his integral role in building the original search engine, AltaVista, originally a research project started by Monier in 1995 that grew into the biggest, fastest and most used search engine on the web. In 1997 Monier launched Babelfish, the first translation service on the web, a predecessor to Google Translate. Under Monier’s technical leadership, AltaVista was the only search engine that worked across languages internationally and had the first image search capabilities of its time. Additionally, he previously was a member of the technical staff at Google where his work on faceted search is used in over 100 applications and served as Head of eBay Research where he rebuilt eBay’s search engine in six months.
Johnson has spent over three decades building large-scale artificial intelligence systems impacting the banking, entertainment and hospitality industries. He is recognized for inventing the modern electronic boarding pass system widely used in the airline industry and applying AI to entertainment e-ticketing, banking and marketing systems for Walt Disney, Universal Studios, Six Flags and many others processing more than $1 billion in transactions annually. As Chief Architect and Head of Engineering for the Boy Scouts for America, Johnson modernized its next generation platform, MyScouting. As Head of R&D for Hanes Hosiery, Johnson revolutionized the retail industry, applying AI to deliver the first web-based vendor management platform for inventory, scheduling, delivery and logistics, deployed at roughly 70% of major US retailers.
“We have a very real information overload problem with more content created online in a single day than one person could sort through in an entire lifetime. That’s why we need to rethink information discovery,” said Fatemi. “Jeffrey and Louis are two seasoned and talented industry trailblazers who have already developed IP that opens up a new $100 billion market to change the way that people connect with opportunity altogether.”
“It is great to be part of this impressive team,” said Monier. “Falon is pioneering information discovery and through our collective expertise, I’m confident we’re on the cusp of ushering in the next phase of search.”
“Node is fundamentally changing the way people and businesses connect and discover opportunities,” said Johnson. “With an underlying data layer of unprecedented scope, Node is already head and shoulders above what most large companies are capable of in terms of AI.”
Node emerged from stealth in 2017 with $16.3 million in funding from renowned entrepreneur Mark Cuban, Avalon Ventures, NEA, and Canaan Partners. The company is offering exclusive demos of the next generation of Node at info.node.io/nextgen.
ABOUT NODE
Node is the first AI-powered discovery engine that connects people with opportunity at massive scale. Node’s proprietary deep learning technology revolutionizes the online discovery process by making sense of the relationships between billions of people and companies on the web and customer-owned data. Sifting through these connections, Node proactively surfaces the most relevant opportunities in real-time to accelerate growth across sales, marketing, recruiting, partnerships and beyond. Companies can leverage Node’s discovery engine through an online platform and/or API. Node was founded by Falon Fatemi – Google’s youngest employee – and is backed by Mark Cuban, NEA, Avalon Ventures, and Canaan Partners. Learn more about how Node is accelerating serendipity at www.node.io
