Curiosity founders Maurice Beckand Verwee and Herman Kienhuis | Image credit: Curiosity
Amsterdam-based new VC firm Curiosity announced on Tuesday that it has launched its early-stage fund and made its first investment of €0.8M in Dutch ‘explainable AI’ startup Deeploy.
Deeploy is an MLOps platform that is working towards making AI explainable, trustworthy and accountable.
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Curiosity’s community-driven investment fund
Dutch venture capital firm Curiosity is focusing on early-stage investments in AI-driven software companies in the Benelux, Nordics and Baltics. It was founded by Herman Kienhuis, former MD of KPN Ventures, and Maurice Beckand Verwee, the founder of startup investor Crosspring.
The firm aims to support European entrepreneurs in building a new generation of AI-driven software companies. Curiosity Early Stage Fund Cooperative UA and Curiosity Venture Capital BV are both registered with the Dutch Financial Authority (AFM) as alternative investment fund and fund manager.
Curiosity’s new fund invests in early-stage round of tech companies in sectors such as enterprise software, marketing/e-commerce, fintech, cybersecurity, legaltech, and proptech. It has a community-driven approach and aims to grow towards a fund size of €50M to invest in 20 software companies.
As of now, 35 investors have committed to the fund, including co-founders of BinckBank, Scoupy, Litebit, and SecurityMatters.
Entrepreneurs backed by the fund benefit from an active community of expert advisors, entrepreneurs, investors, and service partners for support and knowledge sharing. Besides, entrepreneurs supported by Curiosity also become co-owners of the fund.
Curiosity’s founders have also gathered a group of experienced advisors to join the community, including established names such as Daniel Gebler (Picnic), Ulla Kruhse-Lehtonen (DAIN Studios), Patrick de Laive (TNW), Jan Kees de Jager (Easygenerator), Aik Deveneijns (Levelup), and Christina Caljé (Autheos).
“Making Machine Learning explainable”
Founded in August 2020 by Bastiaan van de Rakt, Tim Kleinloog, Maarten Stolk, and Nick Jetten, Deeploy is a software company that makes Machine Learning (ML) deployments accountable by giving explainable AI (XAI) a central place in ML operations (MLOps).
In simple terms, with a growing number of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and ML models going to production to accelerate efficiency and smart business operations across industries, Deeploy offers a software solution for manageable, explainable and accountable deployments.
The company aims to give humans the power to understand what models are doing and correct automated decisions. These features ensure that AI systems are accountable.
Curiosity’s Kienhuis says, “More and more data is available and collected, combined with smarter technology and algorithms for data processing and machine learning. Therefore, AI is on the verge of its big breakthrough, and will soon be adding substantial value to countless industries. This also means there’s an increased focus on the transparency and accountability of the decisions made by algorithms, and the EU is working on new regulations regarding the use of AI as we speak.”
“Deeploy’s software fits in perfectly with these developments, and the four founders have the right expertise, execution power and to help companies with an effective product offering,” adds Kienhuis.
Capital utilisation
The proceeds from this round will help Deeploy to further develop its software in order to serve large enterprise customers, and to build a professional sales organisation for future international expansion.
Speaking about the investor, Bastiaan van de Rakt says, “Besides the obvious fit with the fund’s focus areas, and two experienced investors in charge that combine practical and strategic expertise, for us, the community focus of Curiosity adds enormous value. By making both entrepreneurs and advisors co-owners of the fund, a cross-fertilisation of various expertise and knowledge is stimulated. This makes for a strong supporting network to create continuous growth for all companies in the portfolio.”
In the long term, Deeploy is planning to develop its current cloud-based software into a full SaaS solution.
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