May 15, 2022

Total raised: Undisclosed Not to be confused with international freight forwarding startup Vector AI, London-based Vektor AI is a new platform matching prospective career mentors with mentees. Founded in January 2022, Vektor AI uses artificial intelligence in its mentor "matching" process and was founded by Anna Buldakova and her husband and one-time Meta colleague Victor Buldakov. Anna worked as a project manager for the AI team at Workplace, Meta's work communication platform that rivals Slack and Teams. "It was mostly trying to understand how we could leverage AI to make sure that we make work communication much better and more straightforward, and more inclusive," such as closed caption features for videos, Buldakova said. Cofounder Victor was formerly a tech lead at WhatsApp and is now chief technology officer at Vektor. Anna Buldakova said part of the inspiration for Vektor AI came from seeing the need for new channels of career mentorship during the COVID-19 pandemic. "More and more people were looking for this professional support, because they weren't getting it from the connections that would usually happen in the office." Buldakova said the startup has brought on multiple European VCs for seed funding, but the firm hasn't disclosed any figures raised to date. Marc Faddoul fought misinformation at Meta — now he's scrutinizing Meta's algorithms. When it was founded: 2016 Partners include: Reset, NGI Ledger, Datactive Marc Faddoul is co-director and cofounder of Tracking Exposed, a company that builds free software and investigates algorithm-based recommendations on major social networks. Paris-based Marc Faddoul spent a year between 2019 and 2020 as a research scientist at Meta's AI division, working to improve the company's disinformation practices. Trained as a computer scientist, Faddoul became increasingly interested in the "societal impact of technology," he said. In 2021, he cofounded AI Forensics, a non-profit that examines the impact of artificial intelligence on human rights. He's also a visiting researcher at UC Berkeley's Human Rights Center. AI Forensics' main project, Tracking Exposed, provides research tools to facilitate independent analysis of algorithm personalization, such as browser plugins that crowdsource data on algorithms used by sites including Facebook, Youtube, Amazon, and Pornhub. Tracking Exposed published a series of reports on political "shadow banning" on TikTok earlier this year. It also found that pro-war content flourished on the video-sharing app in the early weeks of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Faddoul became interested in the ethics of recommendation algorithms long before he did research at FAIR between October 2019 and September 2020. When he joined Meta as a visiting researcher still employed by Berkeley, Faddoul found that his own influence on the company's algorithms was limited. "It was a bit frustrating because I was trying to make suggestions, which I think were much more meaningful than just trying to make small improvements, but it was not really the kind of scope of what I was being asked to do," he said. Tracking Exposed now has a team of about 12. "There is still a big lack of civil society organization, but even just independent actors who are able to scrutinize the recommendation engine of some of the major platforms," Faddoul said. Douwe Kiela is head of research at Hugging Face, which makes open source natural language processing tech. Douwe Kiela, giving a TED Talk in 2017 TEDx Talks / Youtube Backers include: Addition, Lux Capital, A.Capital Amount raised: $164.91 million, per Pitchbook Douwe Kiela joined FAIR in October 2016 as a postdoctoral researcher and stayed for five years as a research scientist. He worked on natural language understanding and generation, including creating a virtual assistant bot that could navigate tourists around a city. He joined Palo Alto-based Hugging Face as its head of research in January 2022. He's also an adjunct professor at Stanford University. Hugging Face is an AI startup and community that offers models for a variety of natural language tasks, and has been dubbed the "GitHub of machine learning". On Monday, it announced the close of its $100 million Series C funding round, bringing the company's total valuation to $2 billion. Over the last 12 months, Hugging Face has grown from a team of 30 to over 120 employees, and says more than 10,000 companies use it to build tech using machine learning. Heinrich Küttler left a research engineering manager gig at Meta to set up Inflection AI. When it was founded: 2022 Backers include: Greylock Partners Amount raised: Undisclosed Inflection AI is a new machine learning startup launched in 2022, based in Silicon Valley. It was founded by AI researcher Karén Simonyan, LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, and DeepMind cofounder Mustafa Suleyman. In March 2022, the company brought former DeepMind and Meta research engineer Heinrich Küttler into its founding team. The move reunites Küttler with Suleyman, who  left DeepMind under a cloud in 2019 . Inflection AI describes itself as an "AI-first company, redefining human-computer interaction," developing AI software that essentially makes communication between humans and computers more effective. Aparna Lakshmiratan left a director role at Meta for unicorn machine learning startup Snorkel AI. Aparna Lakshmiratan. Backers include: Addition, BlackRock, Greylock Amount raised: $138.25 million, per Pitchbook After nearly seven years at Meta as director of product management for AI platforms, Aparna Lakshmiratan left to join Snorkel AI in March 2022 as its VP of product. She holds a Ph.D. in artificial intelligence and worked at Microsoft as a principal program manager prior to Meta. Snorkel AI is a spin out from Stanford AI Lab, based in the Bay Area. It works on data-centric AI approaches and in collaboration with several top US banks , Fortune 500 companies, government agencies, and the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. Snorkel AI's Series C round brought in $85 million in fresh funds, bringing its total valuation to $1 billion. Alexandre Lebrun left Menlo Park in 2018 for Nabla, a Paris-based healthcare app for women. Alexandre Lebrun Backers include: Xavier Niel, Artemis, Rachel Delacour, Julie Pellet Amount raised: $22.68 million, per Pitchbook Y Combinator alum Alexandre Lebrun has been engaged in the startup world since the early 2000s. In 2002, he founded VirtuOz, a customer relationship platform dubbed "Siri for the enterprise" that he bootstrapped in Paris. It was sold to speech and language technology platform Nuance in 2013, having raised a total of $20.4 million in venture funding. By then, Alexandre Lebrun had moved to his second startup, Wit.ai, an AI-powered app to help developers make Siri-like interfaces. When Wit.ai was acquired by Meta in 2015, Lebrun joined the AI lab's engineering team in Menlo Park. After three years, Lebrun relocated back to Paris to found Nabla, a women-focused healthcare app. Nabla offers users text conversations with medical professionals to streamline care. The company says its aim is to enhance patient communication, rather than replace in-person medical consultation. It uses machine learning technology to provide relevant medical content to users and centralize medical data. Vitaliy Liptchinsky, ex-head of AI research platform and infrastructure at Meta, now is a senior director of engineering at Paxos. When it was founded: 2012 Backers include: Oak HC/FT, Declaration Partners, Mithril Capital Amount raised: $537.5 million For five years, Liptchinsky worked on AI projects at Meta's Menlo Park headquarters. Hired as a researcher of AI speech recognition, he later progressed to head of West Coast research engineering at FAIR, and head of AI research for platform and infrastructure. According to his LinkedIn profile, Liptchinsky joined Paxos as senior director of engineering in February 2022. Paxos is a New York City-based startup that offers regulated blockchain infrastructure. The startup closed a $300 million Series D funding round in April 2021 and has an active partnership with PayPal and said in January it would be hiring 400 employees in 2022. Serkan Piantino left his position as director of engineering and cofounder of Meta AI in 2016 to head up deep learning platform Spell.ml. Serkan Piantino Backers include: Eclipse Ventures, Blossom Capital, Two Sigma Ventures Total raised: $15 million Serkan Piantino is a prominent face in both AI engineering and tech policy. He joined Meta in its earliest days, as a software engineer in 2007. He climbed the ladder to become site director of the firm's New York operations, and director of engineering of FAIR. Piantino is also active in tech policy in New York, as a board member of tech:NYC and former member of the city's Council on Technology and Innovation. After nine years, he left in 2016 to create Spell.ml, a New York City-based deep learning startup that went on to launch in 2018. Spell.ml, an end-to-end, collaborative machine learning platform, raised a total of $15 million in its Series A round. The startup aims to lower barriers to entry for small companies wanting to break into AI, a field where research and development is still dominated by large tech companies with deep pockets, like Google's DeepMind, Elon Musk's Open AI, and FAIR. By offering enterprise clients access to the hardware required to run deep learning experiments for $99 per month, Piantino is seemingly intending to disrupt that trend. The company's chief of staff, Noah Robbins, has also been brought on from FAIR. Ronan Riochet, a one-time visiting Ph.D. student at Meta AI, cofounded medical imaging startup Milvue. Ronan Riochet Backers include: Dafford Invest Total raised: $9.23 million Ronan Riochet is cofounder and chief technology officer at Milvue, a Paris-based startup that deploys AI technology for medical imaging and detection. Before Milvue, Riochet was a Ph.D. student researching intuition in AI technologies at L'École Normale Supérieure de Paris, when he did a five-month placement at Meta's AI lab in 2020. He had earlier been a research intern at Meta. His startup Milvue, founded in 2018, has partnerships with more than 20 hospitals across Europe for beta research and development. The startup's Series A funding round in December 2021 brought in $9 million in fresh funds. The round was led by undisclosed backers, but also had participation from more than 50 radiologists, according to Riochet. Milvue also has plans underway for a North American launch. "The proportion of people using AI in hospital for X-ray images is less than 5 or 10%, and, in my opinion, it's just a matter of time because it is working," Riochet said. "We catch errors of doctors, because even if on average they are stronger than AI, you always make mistakes." Anna Susmelj heads up AI at biotech late-stage venture Biognosys. Anna Susmelj Backers include: PM Equity Partner, Syngenta Group Ventures, TVM Capital Life Science Amount raised: $22.04 million, per Pitchbook Anna Susmelj joined Biognosys, a late-stage biotech venture, as head of AI in November 2021, after stints as a postdoctoral researcher at Meta AI in Paris and as a senior data scientist at the Swiss Data Science Center. Biognosys, based in Zurich, Switzerland, was an early player in the buzzy biotech space in Europe. A spinoff from a proteomics lab of the public university ETH Zurich, Biognosys aims to equip clinical researchers with tools to measure proteins from patient tissue. "My hope is that by applying AI methods, compared to standard algorithmic methods that we used before, we can significantly improve identification of the proteins in the samples, and this has a very direct effect," Susmelj said. Biognosys said its Series G funding round, which closed in 2019 and raised an undisclosed amount, would enable its further expansion into the clinical trials market. Eric Steinberger is the founder of climate change education nonprofit, ClimateScience. Eric Steinberger