Probably is not your average AI startup as this new French company is Inria spin-off company that revolves around an open source data science library called scikit-learn — Inria is a well-known French technology research institute.
As for scikit-learn, with over 45,000 stars on GitHub, this Python module is widely used by machine learning teams working on tabular data. It can be used for model fitting, prediction, cross-validation, etc.
If you’re not an ML developer, this might be the first time you’ve heard of scikit-learn. However, many large companies have relied on the library for their own products, including Spotify, Hugging Face, Booking.com, and Dataiku.
Some of the contributors behind scikit-learn and other open source libraries supported by India have decided to form a company to ensure that these projects remain actively developed and properly funded with monetization activities.
Researchers involved in this project include Camille Troillard, Gaël Varoquaux, Olivier Grisel, François Goupil, Guillaume Lemaitre, Jérémie Du Boisberranger and Fabien Gandon.
Yann Lechelle, former CEO of the cloud hosting company Scale, spent four months as an Entrepreneur in Residence at Inria working on this project. After the spin-off from Inria, he will assume the role of CEO of Probabl.
“We’re a software publisher, but our first commercial offerings will include professional services, training and certification, specifically around learning scikit,” Lechelle told me. “Our scope will be broader to cover the full data cycle from organizing and cleaning to machine learning and MLOps.”
As a company, Probabl now has three types of shareholders:
- Public shareholders, such as Inria’s investment subsidiary Inria Participations, the French government through the French Tech Souveraineté program;
- Private equity investors such as Costanoa Ventures.
- And finally individual factors.
All will play a role in the governing body of the newly formed organization. Probabl calls itself a company with a mission of industrial and digital dominance. As a result, it wants to release truly open source projects, something that hasn’t been happening in the AI industry lately.
