Loopio Receives Funding to Accelerate Development of AI/ML Capabilities, Enhance Search
The Loopio product development team has an exciting announcement: we were recently awarded an Industrial Research Assistance Program (IRAP) grant from the National Research Council (NRC) of Canada!
What is IRAP? The NRC IRAP’s goal is to help small and medium-sized businesses develop innovative technologies and bring them to market. The program does this by giving Canadian companies financial assistance, advisory services, and access to some of the best business and R&D expertise in Canada so they can grow faster.
What are we planning to do with the funds? Our goal is to use Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) capabilities to improve the Loopio platform, beginning with Search. This funding will help us to:
- Build an in-house ML team here at Loopio HQ in Toronto
- Augment and enhance our search algorithms using emerging AI capabilities
- Improve users’ overall experience using Search and Magic, our automation feature
- Explore net-new features and functionality related to search, discovery, and recommendation
In a nutshell, Loopio’s IRAP grant will help us build stronger search functionality, surface relevant information when and how it’s needed, and make the process of accessing knowledge even more intelligent and intuitive for our customers.
Keep reading for more details on how this will impact our product roadmap and team over the next year.
P.S. Kudos to Jenny Wood (Search Product Manager) and Tiffany Hsiao (VP of Finance and Operations) for owning the grant application process! You embody our Loopio company values of Support and Grit! 👏👏👏
Loopio Search: Where We Are Today and Where We’re Going
Loopio aims to help our customers find the best needle in the best haystack. Our customers have loads of internal content that is used for responding to Request For Proposals (RFPs), security questionnaires, and Due Diligence Questionnaires (DDQs) that they get from prospects and customers. That content is spread across many departments, teams, and geographies — and it’s always being updated.
We centralize that content, upload it to the cloud, and make it easy for the correct people to manage and access it. Our customers use Loopio to search and discover the most relevant, accurate, and up-to-date internal information needed to write a winning RFP response or answer a challenging question from a prospect.
It’s a heck of a lot easier than pouring through disparate documents, folders, email chains, chat logs, past RFP submissions, irritating your coworkers, etc. *shiver*
We also have a tool — called Magic — that automatically answers questions using intelligent detection, mapping, and matching capabilities. Just upload your source document into Loopio, and let Magic take a crack at it. As you might imagine, this saves teams a lot of time vs. manually finding, copying, and pasting in answers to questions they’ve seen time and time again.
Moving forward, we want to introduce even more flexibility in how content is stored and interpreted in our platform. Think filtering, metadata, and a better understanding of context and semantics, i.e. what various words actually mean.
In the coming year, some of the ways we plan to invest more in search tools include:
- Update our search algorithms with additional ranking logic
- Surface content based on more user-generated attributes or behaviour
- Add more filtering options for search results
- Explore more integrations with other business tools to increase the ability to access and search Library content outside of the platform
- Continue improving the usability of Search, Magic, and other Library maintenance tools
What the Coming Months Look Like for Loopio’s EPD Teams
We’re really excited about how quickly we can innovate in our product (and the RFP space at large!) as a result of this funding.
Delivering tangible value to our customers in the coming months will require our Engineering, Product, and Design teams to experiment and rapidly iterate. We’ll be dedicating time and resources to researching the best path forward, as well as growing our team so we can bring in fresh perspectives and move faster.
If you’re interested in exploring the exciting world of Search, AI and ML with us, check out our open Engineering, Design, and Product roles at loopio.com/careers.
