Pienso discovers $2.1m seed round

Pienso, a US-based machine learning interface developer spun out from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), today closed a $2.1m seed round led by venture capital firm Eniac Ventures.
SoftTech VC, Indicator Ventures and E14 Fund also took part in the round.
Founded in 2016, Pienso has developed an enterprise software tool that enables machine learning capabilities to be embedded into IT systems without specialist programming knowledge.
Clients train and refine machine learning models through a semi-supervised user interface, which takes onboard structured and unstructured text data.
The technology also supports complex statistical or probabilistic graphical models such as those in deep learning applications. Pienso will use the capital to scale its operations.
Pienso was co-founded by its chief technology officer Karthik Dinakar, a former Reid Hoffman fellow at MIT, and chief executive Birago Jones, previously director of strategic partnerships and creative director at augmented reality technology developer Upskill.
Jones said: “To make artificial intelligence more valuable, human expertise is needed in training the algorithm.
“In many cases researchers, analysts, and other knowledge workers do not have a computer science or advanced statistical background, so they rely on someone else to input their knowledge – unfortunately, often the nuance, context, and details get lost in that process.”