Primal, a Kitchener-based AI company focused on language, announced Wednesday it has received $2.3 million in loan-based financing from BDC, the Business Development Bank of Canada.
Primal is a cloud-based system that can read social media feeds, understand their context, then find and push products and content related to that post.
“We can now interrogate any written text and build knowledge graphs around it,” said Primal COO Jeff McDowell.
The new money, McDowell said, will be used to “finish building products, get them out into the market and generate some revenue and set us up for larger commercial funding rounds in the future.”
Primal, which now has 10 employees, has attracted more than $20 million in angel financing. Its president and CEO is Yvan Couture, one of Communitech’s founders.
“AI is not about replacing humans but about making humans smarter, better, faster,” said Couture in a release. “We are excited to receive this support from BDC as it will help us bring AI to life in meaningful ways – shaping the future of how people perform in business and everyday life.”
Primal’s technology doesn’t use machine learning, which requires large data sets.
“We’ve pre-encoded a vocabulary into our proprietary system called AKRM – atomic knowledge representation model,” said McDowell.
“We can read your social media stream – things you’ve posted on social media previously – and we build an interest model around you. We now know what you’re interested in. We know what you stand for. What your brand finds important. We can go find content matching that.”
