making technology disappear Product Launch Embargo May 17, 2016
The Story Snips started in 2013 as a research lab in Machine Learning, focusing on building new interfaces between people and machines. The deeper we went, the more we realized every new app, bot or device we use just adds complexity to our lives. And with over 100B connected devices expected by 2025, it is becoming clear that we will soon be overwhelmed by technology. An AI, on the other hand, is very well suited to handle these large scale, complex tasks. By giving it enough data about us, an AI can become highly personal, acting as an extension of ourselves. It could become ubiquitous, learning to imitate how we use technology in different contexts. Technology could disappear into the background, giving us the sensation of being unplugged. Building such an AI though is a very hard task, and will take years to achieve. This is why we decided to focus a first key element: the AI s memory. 2
How the human brain stores information The human brain is a complex network of neurons who constantly form new connections when new information becomes available. But rather than store information sequentially like in a traditional database, it has it scattered all over the brain, linking them as more information becomes available. This enables it to store complex concepts which are related to each other, forming our personal knowledge graph. Recreating Intelligent Memory For an AI to have a working memory and understand a particular person, it needs to pull data from as many sources as possible, such as emails, calendars, contacts or places. and link them to build a personal knowledge graph. At Snips, we have spent the last 3 years assembling a unique team of researchers, building over 20 different technologies to address that particular challenge. Today, we are announcing our first product: an AI that makes your memory intelligent by organizing and retrieving the information in your phone the same way your brain would. 3
The Product Today
About today s product Snips is an app that organizes the information in your phone it remembers everything you tell it, drawing connections and making important things easy to find. Give Snips access to the data you need to remember by connecting your email, calendar, and contacts. Snips will link everything together, creating your first personal knowledge graph. Find things that buried deep in your phone such as hotel reservations or recently visited addresses. Snips also gets smarter with time the more you use your AI, the faster you ll get clever suggestions. Best of all Snips is Private by Design. The AI runs locally on your smartphone, and never sends sensitive information to our servers. To put it differently: no one can see your data. 5
A mobile app that builds your AI s memory 1) Snips is a central hub for all of your personal data 2) Give Snips access to your email, calendar, contacts, and location and it will create a personal knowledge graph connecting all the data in your phone 3) Your calendar events, reservations, addresses, and location information are extracted and become easily retrievable. Your contacts are aggregated across your entire phone search and message anyone from one place 4) Use the Snips Timeline to see a history of your movements so you can know where you were, and quantify your day 6
Connect your data sources Snips will organize it And make it searchable Showing you key information Linked to relevant entities And deep linking into your apps 7 7
The Company
39 humans at Snips 15 nationalities 30 average age 5 exited startups 2013 Snips birthday 1000+ applicants to date 30% of the company hold PhDs $6.3 million seed round *Led by The Hive, with participation from Eniac Ventures, 500 Startups, Brent Hoberman, Xavier Niel and Bpifrance.
The Executive Team Dr Rand Hindi FOUNDER & CEO PhD in bioinformatics @UCL Started coding at the age of 10 Created a social network at 14 Recipient of MIT TR35, Forbes 30 Under 30, Excellence Française Dr Maël Primet CO-FOUNDER & CTO PhD in mathematics and computer vision Created tools allowing users to immediately spot patterns in complex datasets Recipient of Ingénieur du Corps des Mines Michael Fester CO-FOUNDER & CDO PhD (on hold) in Number Theory at Cambridge University Founded 8pen Previously founded two companies in Human-Computer Interaction and Mobile Health Recipient of Gartner Research Cool Vendor award and the Rayleigh Knight Prize of the Faculty of Mathematics at Cambridge. Yann Lechelle COO Started coding at the age of 10 Co-founded four companies including Appsfire for mobile app recommendation Wrote the OpenUDID and OpenIDFA libraries for ios BSc in Computer Science from the American University of Paris (specialized in AI and Neural Networks), as well as an MBA from the INSEAD business school 10
The Leadership Team Joseph Dureau VP Research PhD in Statistics from the London School of Economics, and an MSc in mathematical engineering from Ecole Centrale in Paris Co-founded Science.ai, a TechStars NYC startup that brings the semantic web revolution to science Previously worked at NASA, the CEA and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Steve Tam VP Marketing co-founded three companies, the most recent being a bicycle line named Simcoe, which was acquired in 2014 Was named to Marketing Magazine s 30 Under 30, and is the Toronto Ambassador for the Thousand Network BA Hon from the University of Toronto, and a graduate certificate in Marketing Strategy. Javier Aguera VP Business Development Created the Blackphone, the first privacy-centric smartphone, which was recognized by MIT among the top 10 Technological Breakthroughs in 2014 He successfully sold Blackphone to Silent Circle in 2015, and has been their Chief Scientist since then Was named to Forbes 30 Under 30 in 2016, MIT's TR35 Innovators under 35 BSc in Telematics Engineering by ICAI (Madrid) and SCU (California) Sebastien Maury VP Product Co-founded Fotonauts, a photosharing platform that grew to over 20M users, alongside Jean-Marie Hulot, the former Apple and NeXT CTO. Worked at Apple on the ical team, where he invented the modern calendar application interface used in virtually all calendar apps. Holds a Masters in Computer Science from ENSIMAG Grenoble, and for a time was doing a PhD in Human-Machine Interaction at Toulouse University. 11
Recent Press for the Company (now we need some coverage for the product ;) Snips learns your habits and preferences by applying more than 20 algorithms to your messages, calendar, contact list and background location. Wired Snips has severe competition from the big guns such as Google and Apple. How does it stand out? Privacy. MIT Tech Review By gathering as much data as possible, such as location data and calendar data, the company can show you what you need. Techcrunch Protecting user privacy is among Snips primary objectives, at a time when big data raises the specter of Big Brother, either public or private. That's why Snips has adopted what Hindi calls a "privacy by design" approach. Le Monde 12
Downloads: Logos, images, screenshots, gifs https://drive.google.com/open?id=0b9k0bmqyel79qy1xrjfxlxfezja Access the ios app: https://get.snips.ai/presskit 13
Making technology disappear Maia Sasania maia@snips.ai +33 6 10 59 09 45 18 Rue Saint-Marc, 75002 Paris, France