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Element AI was founded in October 2016 by Jean-François Gagné and co-founders Yoshua Bengio, Anne Martel, Nicolas Chapados, and Philippe Beaudoin, along with Jean-Sébastien Cournoyer of Montreal venture capital fund Real Ventures.[1][4][14] In early 2017, the company acquired the entire team of[15] an open source machine learning database. It then raised US$102 million from US investors in a series A round led by the San Francisco venture fund Data Collective and Microsoft Ventures.[4][5][6][7]
In December 2018, the Government of Canada gave a loan of up to CAD$5 million to Element AI with the goal of creating 900 new jobs.[3] They later hosted a conference on the effects of AI, with Justin Trudeau and Mounir Mahjoubi establishing a global panel to study the effects of AI.[16] In December 2018, Element AI also partnered with Amnesty International and released a study measuring online abuse against women in politics and journalism on Twitter.[10][11]
The company's first standalone product Underwriting Partner, an AI-assisted insurance underwriting workflow software, was released in September 2019.[17][18] In December 2019, they released Knowledge Scout, a platform for data set management in manufacturing companies.[19]
On November 30, 2020, ServiceNow, a Californian cloud-based IT services company, announced it has signed an agreement to acquire Element AI.[8][9] The company was running out of money and options and sold for US $230 million.[20][21]