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$2.5 Million Funding Round for AI: Twenty Billion Neurons Makes Deep Learning Accessible With High-Quality German Engineering
[May 25, 2016]

$2.5 Million Funding Round for AI: Twenty Billion Neurons Makes Deep Learning Accessible With High-Quality German Engineering


BERLIN, May 25, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Deep learning has emerged as the most effective approach by far to the creation of systems that solve real-world problems using artificial intelligence (AI). Deep learning systems are inspired by the neural networks in the human brain, and they have an innate ability to learn from data. The method is also key to many innovations, such as self-driving cars; highly-scalable speech, image, video and text analysis as well as next-level medical diagnostics. Because of the need for high specialized scientific and engineering talent, only a handful of companies have been able to profit fully from deep learning to date.  

TwentyBN wants to change that. The aim of TwentyBN's Central System Intelligence, under development since mid 2015, is to enable customers everywhere to create exciting new products based on deep learning after only a few weeks of initial integration work. TwentyBN is in the middle of nothing less than a revolution in machine intelligence. The TwentyBN AI lab is located in Toronto, Canada.  Its research agenda ranges from advancing the art and science of network design and transfer learning to important technical issues relating to training and serving networks.

The four founders, two of whom have resigned their professorships to devote their full attention to TwentyBN, met each other during studies at the University of Bielefeld in Germany. Each of the founders has over 15 years of experience in machine learning and the relatively young deep learning discipline. Prof. Dr. Roland Memisevic/span>, Chief Scientist, received his doctorate in Toronto, studying with Geoffrey Hinton, one of the founding fathers of deep learning. Prior to co-founding Twenty Billion Neurons, Memisevic was a member of the faculty at the renowned Machine Learning Institute of the University of Montréal led by Yoshua Bengio. The institute counts Google, Facebook, and IBM amongst its most active donors. Dr. Christian Thurau (Chief Technology Officer) and Dr. Florian Hoppe (Managing Director) worked at the Fraunhofer Society, Europe's largest application-oriented research institution. Until recently, Dr. Ingo Bax (Managing Director) taught at the University of Applied Sciences in Münster, Germany. He also co-build the central software architecture of German XING, which is the equivalent of LinkedIn in that region. Both Thurau and Bax have a track record of founding companies, with substantial venture backing. All four founders have been programming since they were between 7 and 13 years old. The company's funding comes from an entity associated with the family of a New York area private investor who has been involved with successful machine-intelligence-related software, hardware, and services ventures for over 35 years.



TwentyBN will operate from two offices, serving the European market from Berlin and serving the North American market from Toronto.  With their first funding round concluded, TwentyBN now aims to rapidly expand its team in both research and technology.

  • Four German AI experts found first Germany-based deep learning company 
  • TwentyBN builds Central System Intelligence to make AI in the form of deep learning easily accessible to industries and companies of all sizes around the world 
  • The founders each have over 15 years of experience in building AI systems, and a total of over 100 publications in the field.

Press Contact:
Oliver Kanders
[email protected]


Pictures of the founders are HERE!

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SOURCE Twenty Billion Neurons GmbH


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