Sentient Technologies

Sentient Technologies was founded in 2007 by Antoine Blondeau, Babak Hodjat, and Adam Cheyer, the last of whom had helped create the technology behind Siri, and it raised more than 143 million dollars, including a 103.5 million dollar round in 2014 that was then the largest ever for an AI company. It ran an AI hedge fund and built products for e-commerce optimization and visual personalization across a vast grid of borrowed compute. The hedge fund was liquidated in 2018 after underperforming, and in 2019 the company itself was taken apart: its Ascend optimization product was sold to Evolv in March, its core AI intellectual property went to Cognizant, and the Sentient brand stopped existing. Enormous funding and credentialed founders produced a set of pieces worth more to other companies than the whole had been worth on its own. It is the rare entry that died by dispersal rather than by a single shutdown.

Founded

2007-01

Shut down

2019-03-21

Funding raised

$143M

Years alive

12

Founders

Antoine Blondeau, Babak Hodjat, Adam Cheyer