Applied Xlabs
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Applied XL raises $1.5M to build ‘editorial algorithms’ that track real-time data
Applied XL, a startup creating machine learning tools with what it describes as a journalistic lens, is announcing that it has raised $1.5 million in seed funding.
Emerging from the Newlab Venture Studio last year, the company is led by CEO Francesco Marconi (previously R&D chief at The Wall Street Journal) and CTO Erin Riglin (former WSJ automation editor). Marconi told me that Applied XL started out by working on a number of different data and machine learning projects as it looked for product-market fit — but it’s now ready to focus on its first major industry, life sciences, with a product launching broadly this summer.
He said that Applied XL’s technology consists of “essentially a swarm of editorial algorithms developed by computational journalists.” These algorithms benefit from “the point of view and expertise of journalists, as well as taking into account things like transparency and bias and other issues that derive from straightforward machine learning development.”
Marconi compared the startup to Bloomberg and Dow Jones, suggesting that just as those companies were able to collect and standardize financial data, Applied XL will do the same in a variety of other industries.
He suggested that it makes sense to start with life sciences because there’s both a clear need and high demand. Customers might include competitive intelligence teams at pharmaceutical companies and life sciences funds, which might normally try to track this data by searching large databases and receiving “data vomit” in response.
Update: Marconi provided additional context about the startup’s initial focus via email, writing,”The life science industry has specific information needs currently not being fully met by existing private and public data sources; for example, many existing data providers cannot provide the kind of real-time context life science organizations require to make decisions on clinical development, competitive positioning and commercialization.”
“Our solution for scaling [the ability to spot] newsworthy events is to design the algorithms with the same principles that a journalist would approach a story or an investigation,” Marconi said. “It might be related to the size of the study and the number of patients, it might be related to a drug that is receiving a lot of attention in terms of R&D investment. All of these criteria that a science journalist would bring to clinical trials, we’re encoding that into algorithms.”
Eventually, Marconi said the startup could expand into other categories, building industry “micro models.” Broadly speaking, he suggested that the company’s mission is “measuring the health of people, places and the planet.”
The seed funding was led by Tuesday Capital, with participation from Frog Ventures, Correlation Ventures, Team Europe (the investment arm of Delivery Hero co-founder Lukasz Gadowski) and Ringier executive Robin Lingg.
“With industry leading real-time data pipelining, Applied XL is building the tools and platform for the next generation of data-based decision making that business leaders will rely on for decades,” said Tuesday Capital partner Prashant Fonseka in a statement. “Data is the new oil and the team at Applied XL have figured out how to identify, extract and leverage one of the most valuable commodities in the world.”
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Newlab and The Boston Globe team up to launch AI tools startup Applied XLabs
Applied XLabs is a new startup building tools that can automate data-gathering for journalists — and eventually, for knowledge workers in other industries.
The company is emerging from Brooklyn-based Newlab, with The Boston Globe as its launch partner. It will be led by Francesco Marconi (pictured above), who was previously R&D chief at The Wall Street Journal and head of AI strategy at the Associated Press.
Marconi told me that there’s a tremendous amount of data out there that could be useful to journalists, whether that’s inside public company filings or academic climate change research. But data-driven journalism remains a sliver of the industry, because “only a handful of organizations have the internal resources to create these types of tools, these types of analyses.”
The plan is for Applied XLabs to develop products to help newsrooms, starting with The Globe, automatically pull data and generate insights.
Vinay Mehra, president of The Boston Globe, said the hope is to use AI to improve the information that Globe journalists provide to different communities.
For example, Mehra said that The Globe has been expanding its coverage in Rhode Island, partly in response to the disappearance of local newspapers and the resulting “news deserts.” When the team started talking to the community about what kind of coverage they wanted to see, they came up with a long list of ideas like restaurant openings and closings. (That’s something news startup Hoodline, co-founded by Extra Crunch Managing Editor Eric Eldon, has also tried to tackle with data and automation.)
But providing comprehensive coverage in these areas is tough with a small newsroom, Mehra said: “We can’t keep throwing journalists at this.” So the idea is to “mine that data” and make existing journalists more effective.
At the same time, he emphasized that he doesn’t see AI as a way to replace journalists or justify newsroom cuts, and he noted that The Globe continues to hire.
“We can’t sit back and ignore these technologies that are coming out every day,” Mehra said. “The opportunity here is to redefine what is possible with AI, to expand our own thinking and horizons around how we do journalism today and how we serve these communities.”
Marconi added that ultimately, these tools could also be sold to knowledge workers in a variety of industries.
“The same way that you have Salesforce for managing the sales process, we are building the platform for knowledge workers,” he said. “The reason why it’s so important to start with news and why we’re working with journalists [is] the threshold is really, really high. If you are able to build products and seeds of information that editors can use and sign off on, then you can quickly expand into other industries.”
Applied XLabs is also the first startup to emerge from Newlab’s venture studio program. When we first visited Newlab back in 2016, it described itself as a workspace for companies in robotics, AI and other fields. Now it has created a studio model where it aims to bring together “diverse stakeholders” to create new companies in frontier tech.
“There is a substantial investment from Newlab, and in addition to capital, Newlab is providing all of the back-office services,” Marconi said. “I get the stability of an established company with the freedom, flexibility and creativity of a new venture.”
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