Alliance of competencies will help PwC’s clients turn their data silos into value
23 September 2018 – PwC Germany and Cortical.io have recently signed a joint business relationship agreement whereby PwC becomes partner of Cortical.io and develops natural language understanding solutions using Cortical.io’s technology.
A young tech company, Cortical.io has developed a unique natural language understanding technology that solves many challenges related to big text data. The novel, meaning-based algorithm is based on Cortical.io’s patented Semantic Folding methodology. It allows both high-precision and high-speed semantic text processing and can be applied to any kind of unstructured text data. The application fields are close to endless, and practically all verticals can benefit from this innovation.
“Nowadays, every business, whether small or large, collects overwhelming amounts of text data,” explains Francisco Webber, CEO and co-founder of Cortical.io, the high demand for new data processing solutions across all industry sectors. “Each business is confronted with at least one big text data issue: some need to classify products based on lengthy text descriptions, others must extract key information from complicated legal or technical documents. Most companies need help in interacting with their customers, answering questions, recommending products, and so forth. All need an automated, reliable solution that can be easily adapted to their particular use case and can deliver first results within a few weeks. This is exactly what Cortical.io offers,” comments Webber.
PwC is one of the leading auditing and consultancy organizations in Germany and provides support to clients of different sizes, in a wide range of sectors. “In order to create a real value for our customers, our solutions focus on innovative technologies, but only if they have proven their worth in practical applications,” explains Sven Fessler, Senior Manager Big Data & Analytics at PwC Germany. “Cortical.io fulfills both criteria: they have developed a completely new approach to text processing and have already successfully deployed solutions in multiple enterprise environments”.
Cortical.io’s semantic technology is currently in production at several Fortune 500 companies where it is integrated into existing software solutions, in very different contexts. Sascha Demgensky, attorney and auditor at PwC, who, together with Sven Fessler, initiated the partnership, comments: “Next to its disruptive character, Cortical.io’s technology is easily adaptable to any business domain and delivers prompt, impressive results. We are confident that, combined with PwC’s expertise, we can offer our customers intelligent solutions that will impact their bottom line sustainably”. Cortical.io’s solutions that already bring customers significant cost savings include semantic search and contract analytics.
“The partnership with PwC represents a strategic move for Cortical.io,” states Francisco Webber. “PwC’s focus on high quality, their many years of experience and the wide range of professional services they provide make them an ideal partner to spread our technology. Major innovations are coming ahead in the field of natural language understanding,” concludes Webber, “and you can be sure that Cortical.io and PwC will be major forces behind this disruption.”
About Cortical.io:
Cortical.io offers Natural Language Understanding (NLU) solutions based on Semantic Folding, a methodology that opens a fundamentally new perspective on the handling of big text data. Inspired by the latest findings on how the brain processes information, the Cortical.io Retina engine converts language into semantic fingerprints, numerical representations that capture meaning explicitly.
The uniqueness of the Cortical.io algorithm makes it possible to solve many open NLU challenges, like meaning-based filtering of terabytes of unstructured text data, real-time topic detection in social media and semantic searching through millions of documents across multiple languages.
The company was founded in 2011 and holds a broad general license for Numenta’s HTM technology. Cortical.io has offices in Vienna (Austria), New York and the San Francisco Bay Area.
Disclaimer:
In this document, “PwC” or “PwC Germany” refers to PricewaterhouseCoopers GmbH Wirtschaftsprüfungsgesellschaft, which is a member firm of PricewaterhouseCoopers International Limited, each member firm of which is a separate legal entity. This document is for general information purposes only and should not be used as a substitute for consultation with professional advisors.
