probably This new French company isn’t your typical AI startup. Inria A spin-off company centered around an open source data science library called scikit-learn — Inria is a famous French technology research institute.
With over 45,000 stars on GitHub, scikit-learn is a Python module widely used by machine learning teams working with tabular data. It can be used for model fitting, prediction, cross-validation, etc.
Unless you’re an ML developer, this may be the first time you’ve heard of scikit-learn. However, many large companies rely on libraries for their products, including Spotify, Hugging Face, Booking.com, and Dataiku.
Some of the contributors to scikit-learn and other Inria-backed open source libraries are forming companies to ensure that these projects continue to be actively developed and their revenue-generating activities adequately funded. I have decided that.
Researchers participating in this project include Camille Troillard, Gaël Valroqueau, Olivier Grisel, François Goupil, Guillaume Lemaître, Jérémy du Boisbelanger and Fabien Gandon.
Yann Rechel, former CEO of a cloud hosting company scale wayworked on this project for four months as Inria’s Entrepreneur in Residence. After the spin-off from Inria, he will become his CEO of Probabl.
“We are a software publisher, but our first commercial offerings will include professional services, training, and certification, specifically for scikit-learn,” Yann Lechelle told me. “Our scope will further expand to cover the entire data cycle, from organizing and cleaning to machine learning and his MLOps.”
As a company, Probabl currently has three types of shareholders.
- General shareholders, including Inria’s investment subsidiary Inria Participations, and the French government through the French Tech Souveraineté program.
- Private shareholders such as Costanoa Ventures.
- And finally, individual contributors.
They will all be part of the governing body of the new organization. Probabl describes itself as a company with a mission of industrial and digital sovereignty. As a result, the company wants to release a true open source project, which is not the case these days in the AI industry.