AI startup Pryon raises $100 million

Pryon , a startup that employs AI to extract insights and retrieve answers from corporate knowledge bases, announced a $100 million investment led by Thomas Tull’s US Innovative Technology Fund . Notably, Tull is also the founder of Tulco LLC, which had invested in an AI insurance business subsequently acquired by insurance broker Acrisure for $400 million in July 2020

The founder of Pryon, Igor Jablokov, plans to allocate the new capital to bolster the company’s growth, grow its 100-member staff, augment its international footprint, and enhance strategic partnerships.

Before founding Pryon, Jablokov headed the multimodal AI research team at IBM. He later established Yap, a voice recognition startup resembling Siri, which Amazon purchased in 2011, accelerating Alexa’s development. Interestingly, the name “Pryon” originated from Amazon’s codename for the speech engine foundational to Alexa.

Founded in 2017, Pryon functions as an assistant that can integrate with third-party chatbots, processing various data types like audio, images, and text, and transforming them into a searchable format compatible with any connected interface.