Alma Mundi Ventures Invests In Artificial Intelligence Startup Nnaisense

Nnaisense's president and co-founder is Jürgen Schmidhuber, scientific director at the Swiss AI lab, IDSIA and luminary in the fields of reinforcement learning and neural networks, especially recurrent neural networks (RNNs) which allow AI machines to learn to remember.

Alma Mundi Ventures is a venture capital firm focused on technology-based companies, which emphasizes business to business models that are raising their series A or B rounds. They invest between $500,000 and $5 million in each company through their first fund.

In 1997, Schmidhuber and Nnaisense Advisor Sepp Hochreiter co-authored the seminal paper about Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM). LSTM is used by Amazon, Apple, Baidu, IBM, Google and Microsoft to solve real-world problems today. LSTM can efficiently learn from experience to classify, process and predict time series when there are long time lags between key events. Schmidhuber is known as "the guy who taught AI to remember."

The other co-founders, all former IDSIA researchers, are Faustino Gomez (CEO), Jan Koutník, Jonathan Masci, and Bas Steunebrink, are pioneers of very deep learning and reinforcement learning due to several technology firsts.

Nnaisense AI inside Audi
On stage at the conference and workshop on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) last month Nnaisense technology was used to autonomously park an Audi model car.  This demonstration was made possible by close collaboration between Audi AG and Nnaisense in developing a deep reinforcement learning system that trains the car to park in simulation, using only raw camera data.  Once trained, the resulting recurrent neural network "brain" is transferred to the car where it smoothly controls steering, accelerator, and brakes, to maneuver it to the parking spot from any start position. This was the first time reinforcement learning was used to park a vehicle; the significance of this milestone is that the model car learned without a teacher. Another customer is Acatis Investment GmbH, which manages over €3 billion, and uses Nnaisense AI programs for financial prediction for asset management.

"Alma Mundi Ventures aspires to invest in global technology innovation leaders. Nnaisense is at the forefront of next generation AI," said Rajeev Singh-Molares, founding partner, Alma Mundi Ventures. "And Nnaisense is off to an impressive start with high profile projects with Audi and Acatis amongst others," he added.

The Alma Mundi investment will be used to hire top engineers and researchers to satisfy the growing need for Nnaisense's technology in industries such as manufacturing and financial services.

Picture left to right: Nnaisense Co-Founders Bas Steunebrink, Jan Koutnik, Faustino Gomez (CEO), Jonathan Masci, and Jurgen Schmidhuber (president) with Alma Mundi Ventures Founding Partner Rajeev Singh-Molares outside of the University of Lugano library. / Mundi Ventures

(Press release)