French Alumni scaleup of EIT Digital Accelerator, Julie Desk who has been developing an AI-based personal assistant has raised €2.5 million led by Side Capital, Entrepreneur Ventures and SAAS Lab.
With this new investment, the startup wants to develop the performance of its algorithm. It also wants to accelerate its development in Anglo-Saxon countries.
Founded by Julien Hobeika, Nicolas Marlier and Guillaume Michiels in 2013, Julie Desk develops a virtual task organisation service. This can include setting appointments, adding, canceling, or posting events in a calendar. To do this, the user must enter an email address when sending an email that analyzes the information contained in order to organize the appointment according to the availability of each one. The event is then automatically added to the calendar.
Julien Hobeka, CEO of Julie Desk said "When we were part of the <link accelerator>EIT Digital Accelerator the teams played an important role in helping us to access new markets and customers in other European countries. They supported us in growing our business and attracting potential future institutional and private investors."
"We are also very happy to be part of a 2017 EIT Digital Industry Action Line Innovation Activity called <link newsroom news article eit-digital-to-develop-virtual-assistant-to-save-office-workers-from-email-overload>"Multi-channel & artificial intelligence based virtual assistant" continues Julien Hobeka.
The "Multi-channel & artificial intelligence based virtual assistant" innovation activity will combine the know-how and existing solutions of several EIT Digital partners; Télécom Saint-Étienne, Fondazione Bruno Kessler, and E-Group. The solution will draw on the cloud-hosted end-to-end hybrid virtual assistant called "Julie", developed by the French EIT Digital scaleup, Julie Desk, in 2015. The main deliverable of the innovation activity will be an improved and more scalable version of Julie, and the setting up of new service startups to launch the new product on the market.
The "Multi-channel & artificial intelligence based virtual assistant" innovation activity is one of the 13 innovation activities of the Digital Infrastructure action line of EIT Digital for 2017. The Digital Infrastructure action line focuses on enabling digital transformation by providing secure, robust, responsive, and intelligent communications and computation facilities for the markets. The action line targets in networking the mobile broadband infrastructure, network softwarisation, and the Internet of Things (IoT); in computing: cloud computing, Big Data, and Artificial Intelligence; in security: privacy, cyber security, and digital ID management.
