Element AI Expands International Presence with New Singapore Partnerships

The Canadian AI ecosystem continues to expand well beyond the country’s borders.

Element AI today announced new partnerships with GIC, SGInnovate and Singapore Management University (SMU) at an event that featured Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Element AI already operated in Singapore, and these new partnerships help the Montreal-based company build out the relationships they have with other southeast Asian organizations as well as Singapore’s overall AI ecosystem.

This latest move is part of Element AI’s plans to expand and become a global company, a goal the company has committed to since their launch in late 2016. Element AI specializes in creating AI solutions for all sorts of third parties from insurance providers to supply chain experts and hopes those products they develop can also go towards solving deeper global issues through the empowerment of NGOs and local actors. This move in Singapore replicates a model of success Element AI has launched before that involves partnering with startup incubators, academia and corporations to develop a network of AI expertise in a new market.

“The Singapore industrial ecosystem consists of renowned institutions with deep expertise in building global enterprises, incubators with a proven history of launching world-changing companies, and prestigious academic institutions conducting the research critical to understanding the world around us and lighting the path forward,” said Element AI CEO Jean-François Gagné.

“This Singapore technology ecosystem is familiar to us at Element AI because it’s that environment that led to the creation of our company, so we’re thrilled to be signing agreements with these like-minded partners today. Through collaborative research drawing on the best and brightest expertise from Singapore and Canada, we’re very excited about what is possible as we focus on augmenting collective intelligence and transforming industry as we know it with the help of role-centric AI products.”

GIC is a sovereign wealth fund based in Singapore, and together with Element AI they will look to apply advanced machine learning algorithms to the problems commonly faced by asset managers. SGInnovate—a government-run organization that scales tech startups—will work with Element AI to expand the depth of the talent pool in Singapore, an extremely fast-growing market. Thorugh hosted events and other initiatives, the two will come together to develop AI solutions to create opportunities for companies to deploy proprietary AI solutions.

Finally, Element AI and SMU will collaborate together on research looking into the governance of AI. SMU will look at how it can be applied in Asia while Element AI will look at the North American perspective.

With these new partnerships, Element AI is further realizing their goal to democratize AI and bring the new technology to as many different communities and organizations as possible.

“Figuring out the right way to shape outcomes should not be something we think of on top of our ivory tower,” Gagné told Techvibes earlier this year. “It should emerge from collaboration and a community that has a voice. The only way we make the right decisions is through adding rational and educated people that are understanding and have access to the tech themselves.”