Enterprise

AI startup Sorcero secures $10M for language intelligence platform

Comment

Digital transformation concept. Binary code. AI (Artificial Intelligence).
Image Credits: metamorworks / Getty Images

Sorcero announced Thursday a $10 million Series A round of funding to continue scaling its medical and technical language intelligence platform.

The latest funding round comes as the company, headquartered in Washington, D.C. and Cambridge, Massachusetts, sees increased demand for its advanced analytics from life sciences and technical companies. Sorcero’s natural language processing platform makes it easier for subject-matter experts to find answers to their questions to aid in better decision making.

CityRock Venture Partners, the growth fund of H/L Ventures, and Harmonix Fund co-led the round and were joined by new investors Rackhouse, Mighty Capital and Leawood VC, as well as existing investors, Castor Ventures and WorldQuant Ventures. The new investment gives Sorcero a total of $15.7 million in funding since it was founded in 2018.

Prior to starting Sorcero, Dipanwita Das, co-founder and CEO, told TechCrunch she was working in public policy, a place where scientific content is useful, but often a source of confusion and burden. She thought there had to be a more effective way to make better decisions across the healthcare value chain. That’s when she met co-founders Walter Bender and Richard Graves and started the company.

“Everything is in service of subject-matter experts being faster, better and less prone to errors,” Das said. “Advances of deep learning with accuracy add a lot of transparency. We are used by science affairs and regulatory teams whose jobs it is to collect scientific data and effectively communicate it to a variety of stakeholders.”

The total addressable market for language intelligence is big — Das estimated it to be $42 billion just for the life sciences sector. Due to the demand, the co-founders have seen the company grow at 324% year over year since 2020, she added.

Raising a Series A enables the company to serve more customers across the life sciences sector. The company will invest in talent in both engineering and on the commercial side. It will also put some funds into Sorcero’s go-to-market strategy to go after other use cases.

In the next 12 to 18 months, a big focus for the company will be scaling into product market fit in the medical affairs and regulatory space and closing new partnerships.

Oliver Libby, partner at CityRock Venture Partners, said Sorcero’s platform “provides the rails for AI solutions for companies” that have traditionally found issues with AI technologies as they try to integrate data sets that are already in existence in order to run analysis effectively on top of that.

Rather than have to build custom technology and connectors, Sorcero is “revolutionizing it, reducing time and increasing accuracy,” and if AI is to have a future, it needs a universal translator that plugs into everything, he said.

“One of the hallmarks in the response to COVID was how quickly the scientific community had to do revolutionary things,” Libby added. “The time to vaccine was almost a miracle of modern science. One of the first things they did was track medical resources and turn them into a hook for pharmaceutical companies. There couldn’t have been a better use case for Sorcero than COVID.”

AI is ready to take on a massive healthcare challenge

 

More TechCrunch

On the heels of OpenAI announcing the latest iteration of its GPT large language model, its biggest rival in generative AI in the U.S. announced an expansion of its own.…

Anthropic is expanding to Europe and raising more money

If you’re looking for a Starliner mission recap, you’ll have to wait a little longer, because the mission has officially been delayed.

TechCrunch Space: You rock(et) my world, moms

Apple devoted a full event to iPad last Tuesday, roughly a month out from WWDC. From the invite artwork to the polarizing ad spot, Apple was clear — the event…

Apple iPad Pro M4 vs. iPad Air M2: Reviewing which is right for most

Terri Burns, a former partner at GV, is venturing into a new chapter of her career by launching her own venture firm called Type Capital. 

GV’s youngest partner has launched her own firm

The decision to go monochrome was probably a smart one, considering the candy-colored alternatives that seem to want to dazzle and comfort you.

ChatGPT’s new face is a black hole

Apple and Google announced on Monday that iPhone and Android users will start seeing alerts when it’s possible that an unknown Bluetooth device is being used to track them. The…

Apple and Google agree on standard to alert people when unknown Bluetooth devices may be tracking them

The company is describing the event as “a chance to demo some ChatGPT and GPT-4 updates.”

OpenAI’s ChatGPT announcement: Watch here

A human safety operator will be behind the wheel during this phase of testing, according to the company.

GM’s Cruise ramps up robotaxi testing in Phoenix

OpenAI announced a new flagship generative AI model on Monday that they call GPT-4o — the “o” stands for “omni,” referring to the model’s ability to handle text, speech, and…

OpenAI debuts GPT-4o ‘omni’ model now powering ChatGPT

Featured Article

The women in AI making a difference

As a part of a multi-part series, TechCrunch is highlighting women innovators — from academics to policymakers —in the field of AI.

6 hours ago
The women in AI making a difference

The expansion of Polar Semiconductor’s facility would enable the company to double its U.S. production capacity of sensor and power chips within two years.

White House proposes up to $120M to help fund Polar Semiconductor’s chip facility expansion

In 2021, Google kicked off work on Project Starline, a corporate-focused teleconferencing platform that uses 3D imaging, cameras and a custom-designed screen to let people converse with someone as if…

Google’s 3D video conferencing platform, Project Starline, is coming in 2025 with help from HP

Over the weekend, Instagram announced it is expanding its creator marketplace to 10 new countries — this marketplace connects brands with creators to foster collaboration. The new regions include South…

Instagram expands its creator marketplace to 10 new countries

You can expect plenty of AI, but probably not a lot of hardware.

Google I/O 2024: What to expect

The keynote kicks off at 10 a.m. PT on Tuesday and will offer glimpses into the latest versions of Android, Wear OS and Android TV.

Google I/O 2024: How to watch

Four-year-old Mexican BNPL startup Aplazo facilitates fractionated payments to offline and online merchants even when the buyer doesn’t have a credit card.

Aplazo is using buy now, pay later as a stepping stone to financial ubiquity in Mexico

We received countless submissions to speak at this year’s Disrupt 2024. After carefully sifting through all the applications, we’ve narrowed it down to 19 session finalists. Now we need your…

Vote for your Disrupt 2024 Audience Choice favs

Co-founder and CEO Bowie Cheung, who previously worked at Uber Eats, said the company now has 200 customers.

Healthy growth helps B2B food e-commerce startup Pepper nab $30 million led by ICONIQ Growth

Booking.com has been designated a gatekeeper under the EU’s DMA, meaning the firm will be regulated under the bloc’s market fairness framework.

Booking.com latest to fall under EU market power rules

Featured Article

‘Got that boomer!’: How cybercriminals steal one-time passcodes for SIM swap attacks and raiding bank accounts

Estate is an invite-only website that has helped hundreds of attackers make thousands of phone calls aimed at stealing account passcodes, according to its leaked database.

11 hours ago
‘Got that boomer!’: How cybercriminals steal one-time passcodes for SIM swap attacks and raiding bank accounts

Squarespace is being taken private in an all-cash deal that values the company on an equity basis at $6.6 billion.

Permira is taking Squarespace private in a $6.9 billion deal

AI-powered tools like OpenAI’s Whisper have enabled many apps to make transcription an integral part of their feature set for personal note-taking, and the space has quickly flourished as a…

Buy Me a Coffee’s founder has built an AI-powered voice note app

Airtel, India’s second-largest telco, is partnering with Google Cloud to develop and deliver cloud and GenAI solutions to Indian businesses.

Google partners with Airtel to offer cloud and GenAI products to Indian businesses

To give AI-focused women academics and others their well-deserved — and overdue — time in the spotlight, TechCrunch has been publishing a series of interviews focused on remarkable women who’ve contributed to…

Women in AI: Rep. Dar’shun Kendrick wants to pass more AI legislation

We took the pulse of emerging fund managers about what it’s been like for them during these post-ZERP, venture-capital-winter years.

A reckoning is coming for emerging venture funds, and that, VCs say, is a good thing

It’s been a busy weekend for union organizing efforts at U.S. Apple stores, with the union at one store voting to authorize a strike, while workers at another store voted…

Workers at a Maryland Apple store authorize strike

Alora Baby is not just aiming to manufacture baby cribs in an environmentally friendly way but is attempting to overhaul the whole lifecycle of a product

Alora Baby aims to push baby gear away from the ‘landfill economy’

Bumble founder and executive chair Whitney Wolfe Herd raised eyebrows this week with her comments about how AI might change the dating experience. During an onstage interview, Bloomberg’s Emily Chang…

Go on, let bots date other bots

Welcome to Week in Review: TechCrunch’s newsletter recapping the week’s biggest news. This week Apple unveiled new iPad models at its Let Loose event, including a new 13-inch display for…

Why Apple’s ‘Crush’ ad is so misguided

The U.K. AI Safety Institute, the U.K.’s recently established AI safety body, has released a toolset designed to “strengthen AI safety” by making it easier for industry, research organizations and…

UK agency releases tools to test AI model safety