Probabl is a new AI company built around popular library scikit-learn

Probabl is no ordinary smart startup, as the new French company is a competition from Inria, the well-known organization of French technology research, for renting an open-source science library called scikit-learn.

As for Scikit-learn, this Python module has over 45,000 stars on GitHub and is widely used by machine learning teams working with tabular data. Design, estimation, competition, etc. can be used for other purposes.

Unless you're an ML developer, this is your first time hearing about scikit-learn. However, many large companies such as Spotify, Hugging Face, Booking.com and Dataiku rely on the library to build their products.

Some of the contributors behind Scikit-learn and other Inria-supported open source libraries decided to form a company to ensure that these projects continue to evolve and generate good results by generating revenue.

Researchers participating in this project include Camille Troillard, Gaël Varoquaux, Olivier Grisel, François Goupil, Guillaume Lemaitre, Jérémie Du Boisberranger and François Goupil, Guillaume Lemaitre, Jérémie Du Boisberranger and Fabien>
. Lechelle, former CEO of cloud hosting company Scaleway, worked on the project as an entrepreneur-in-home at Inria for four months. Following the competition at Inria, he will work as CEO of Probabl.

“We are a software publisher, but our initial sales will include professional services, training and certification, especially on scikit-learn,” Leicher told me. “Our capabilities will be broader to include the entire data lifecycle, from organization and maintenance to machine learning and MLOps.”

As a company, Probabl has three types of shareholders:

Publicly traded Inria shareholders such as the investment company Inria Partnership; the French government through the French Tech Souveraineté project;
private shareholders such as Costanoa Ventures;
and finally the participants.

They will all play a role in managing the newly created organization. Probabl defines itself as a company with a business and digital management mission. Therefore, it is expected that a truly open project, which has not been included in the intelligence sector recently, will be launched.