TRANSFORMING BUSINESS WITH ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Six strong partners have joined forces in cofounding an artificial intelligence as a service company with a strong foundation in academia and practice. The seed for the company was planted in February of 2017 at the Finnish prime minister’s AI seminar when Hanken School of Economics professor Peter Sarlin and former Nokia CTO and chief strategy officer Tero Ojanperä decided to team up. The cofounding team has strengthened further with Ville Hulkko, cofounder of Valossa (a video AI company); Kaj-Mikael Björk, head of department at Arcada University of Applied Sciences; Juha Hulkko, founder of Elektrobit; and Johan Kronberg, former PwC CEO and chair. Together, they have gathered a team of top AI experts from around the world. The company’s purpose is to democratize artificial intelligence and help its customers become AI-first companies, transforming and creating new business using AI.Sarlin worked for the past ten years on creating groundbreaking research that he successfully turned into products to support his clients.“Most of us agree that AI is going to impact every existing business process as well as creating new business opportunities, but only few organizations are building it,” said Sarlin, Silo.AI’s executive chairman. “Silo.AI’s mission is to help its customers to build AI capabilities faster.”Building on AI expertise and machine learning platforms created over the past decade by Sarlin’s consultancy Infolytika Ventures, Silo.AI has been working in stealth mode since last spring, lending its expertise and understanding of machine learning to clients in a broad array of global business categories. The financial sector has been quick to integrate AI to its processes, and during this past year, Silo.AI’s team has also successfully partnered with forward-thinking players from other sectors, such as media and transportation.“Every company needs AI capabilities,” said Ojanperä, Silo.AI’s CEO. “We help companies to build AI systems and train them with data. AI is not a privilege of few, but needs to serve all organizations, including the public sector.”Silo.AI’s team of AI researchers and engineers and its partner network of AI researchers and companies have grown rapidly during its stealth-mode phase, and the company wants to continue to accelerate this growth. Silo.AI’s aim is to be one of the largest private AI research labs, creating research that can be transformed into concrete business opportunities, and solutions that transform the way we work.“Several strong researchers have joined us in the past months, and we are continuously looking to grow our team with solid machine learning, natural language processing, computer vision, and other AI experts,” said Sarlin.AI is a major paradigm shift impacting every business and how we see our surrounding world. Silo.AI is at the focal point of this shift, joining customers, AI practitioners, and AI researchers to solve concrete problems.More information:

Peter SarlinExecutive Chairman+358405727670peter@silo-ai.hel5.wp-cloud.dev

Tero OjanperäCEO+358405583096 tero@silo-ai.hel5.wp-cloud.dev

Silo.AI is an artificial intelligence as a service company with a strong foundation in academia and practice. The company’s purpose is to democratize artificial intelligence and help its customers become AI-first companies, transforming and creating new business using AI. Silo.AI executes AI projects to solve practical business problems.Peter Sarlin is the executive chairman and chief scientist of Silo.AI, leading the company’s AI platform initiative. Sarlin is also professor of practice at Hanken School of Economics in machine learning and artificial intelligence, with a special focus on applications in financial, economic, and societal disciplines. Sarlin is a research associate with London School of Economics, Halle Institute for Economic Research and University of Cape Town, and has previously worked for the IMF and ECB among others.Tero Ojanperä is CEO of Silo.AI. Previously he was managing partner of Vision+, an early stage venture fund, and he served as Nokia’s CTO and chief strategy officer. Ojanperä is a chairman of the Board of Directors of Tampere University of Technology and Tailorframe. He was nominated as Young Global Leader of World Economic Forum 2006 and has been recognized in the top seven of the Most Creative People in Business 2009 by Fast Company.Ville Hulkko is chief commercial officer of Silo.AI. He is cofounder of Valossa, a Silicon Valley AI startup, and was heading commercialization of the Valossa video AI platform in the United States. He also founded Mustakarhu accelerator, which helps Finnish startups to enter Silicon Valley market.Kaj-Mikael Björk is Head of Research of Silo.AI. During his time as the Head of Department in Arcada University of Applied Sciences, he started the AI track in Arcada as well as Risklab Finland. Within the research projects he has participated in, he has completed more than 70 scientific peer reviewed articles and he has an H-index of 13 (Google scholar). He was also listed among the 10 AI-researchers in Finland in the “digibarometri” survey by ETLA and Arcada was the only UAS named in the same survey.