Thales AI@CENTECH Selects Five Winning Artificial Intelligence Start-Ups

Committed to championing global innovation in artificial intelligence (AI), Thales, as part of its partnership with world-leading business accelerator CENTECH, today announced the 5 start-ups selected by an international jury to participate in its first season of AI@CENTECH: a 6-month program focused on advancing the success of the most promising AI innovators around the world.

Since 2014, Thales has invested nearly 7 billion euros in digital technologies, including artificial intelligence. The AI@CENTECH program, based in Montreal, Canada, enables outstanding start-ups to come together under one roof, quickly raising their profiles, and accelerating their growth and market potential.

"Thales works to develop human centered artificial intelligence systems which will meet tomorrow’s critical challenges, helping us to make the best decisions at decisive moments. For Thales, artificial intelligence must be TrUE: Transparent, Understandable and Ethical. These start-ups demonstrate promising capabilities that will help shape future decisive moments in the aerospace, space, ground transportation, defence and security sectors,” said Siegfried Usal, Thales North America’s Vice President of Digital Innovation and General Manager of Thales Digital Solutions.

About the 5 winning start-ups:

• Age of Minds (Canada) uses simulation environments and rich closed-loop interactions to provide a robust training platform for humans and AI agents to collaborate, learn, and grow together.
• BlackBox (Canada) instantly generates summary keywords of every discussion and scans through video and audio files to find desired information.
• Delfox (France) designed and developed an artificial intelligence solution that allows vehicles in aeronautics, space and defense to evolve autonomously without human intervention or pre-programming.
• Fieldbox.ai (France) has created a platform deploying AI-trained industrial bots in the hearts of factories, continuously and autonomously optimizing processes and operating machines.
• ICM Hub (USA) develops conversational artificial intelligence for airlines, providing an automated, first-class and AI-powered customer service solution that couples natural language processing and machine learning.

Each start-up will receive extensive guidance from leading business and artificial intelligence industry experts and coaches who will provide advisory services related to fundraising, product enhancement, design, visibility, proof of concept, and market access.