Probabl isn’t your average AI startup as this recent French company is an Inria spin-off company that revolves around an open-source data science library called scikit-learn — Inria is a well known French technology research institute.
As for scikit-learn, with greater than 45,000 stars on GitHub, this Python module is widely utilized by machine learning teams working on tabular data. It may well be used for model fitting, predicting, cross-validation, etc.
Unless you’re an ML developer, this could be the primary time you’re hearing about scikit-learn. But many big corporations have relied on the library for their very own products, similar to Spotify, Hugging Face, Booking.com and Dataiku.
Among the contributors behind scikit-learn and other Inria-backed open-source libraries have decided to create an organization to be certain that these projects remain actively developed and properly funded with revenue-making activities.
Researchers who’re joining this project include Camille Troillard, Gaël Varoquaux, Olivier Grisel, François Goupil, Guillaume Lemaitre, Jérémie Du Boisberranger and Fabien Gandon.
Yann Lechelle, the previous CEO of cloud hosting company Scaleway, spent 4 months as Entrepreneur in Residence at Inria working on this project. Following the spinoff from Inria, he’ll assume the role of CEO of Probabl.
“We’re a software publisher, but our first industrial offerings will include skilled services, training and certification, specifically around scikit-learn,” Yann Lechelle told me. “Our scope can be broader to cover the whole data cycle from organization and cleansing to machine learning and MLOps.”
As an organization, Probabl now has three kinds of shareholders:
- Public shareholders, similar to Inria’s investment subsidiary Inria Participations, the French government through its French Tech Souveraineté program;
- Private shareholders, similar to Costanoa Ventures;
- And eventually individual contributors.
They may all play an element within the governing body of the newly formed organization. Probabl is asking itself an organization with an industrial and digital sovereignty mission. In consequence, it desires to release truly open-source projects, which hasn’t been the case currently within the AI industry.
