Primer announces strategic investment agreement with In-Q-Tel

Primer, an artificial intelligence company, announced on October 24 its strategic investment agreement with In-Q-Tel (IQT), the non-profit strategic investor that accelerates the development and delivery of cutting-edge technologies to U.S. government agencies that keep our nation safe.

Primer builds machine learning systems that automate the analysis and summarization of large volumes of unstructured data and documents in natural language. The technology is used by analysts at some of the world’s largest government agencies, financial institutions and retail companies, who face a vast and growing gap between the amount of information they must consume and the limits of human comprehension. Primer frees them up for much higher value tasks.

“Primer’s technology is poised to revolutionize the way our Intelligence Community Partners consume and prioritize information, helping them to identify emerging areas of interest from real-time data,” said George Hoyem, managing partner, investments at In-Q-Tel. “Many enterprise companies claim they’re leveraging artificial intelligence to generate insights from unstructured content—but Primer is one of the few actually delivering on that promise.”

Automated analysis requires a machine that can both read and write, removing the human bottleneck between the flow of information and the hand-off of a report that a decision-maker can immediately use.

“The machines we’re building make sense of the world differently from us,” said Primer founder and CEO Sean Gourley. “As humans, we have unavoidable cognitive limitations. We simply cannot read millions of pages per day to keep track of all the entities—the people, places, and things relevant to our missions—so we take shortcuts. We make hard choices with our limited attention to focus on what we assume to be the most important. What if we could read everything and pay attention to everything, all the time? What would the unfolding world look then? The most important decisions will be made by humans interacting closely with intelligent machines.”

Source: In-Q-Tel