Bratislava-based startup Elv.ai has secured €500,000 from CB ESPRI Impact One fund. The fresh funds will support the company in its further European expansion.
- Elv.ai develops a tool for text analysis. It was co-founded by Jakub Šuster, Gabriel Tóth, Ľudovít Ďurman, and Milan Dubec in 2022 as a non-profit project by the Slovak communications agency, New School Communications. After a few months of operation, the agency spun off the service into a separate startup.
- Elv.ai solution appeared in a response to hybrid warfare and Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. By combining AI with human moderators, it monitors comments in social networks, to find and remove any inappropriate and hateful content, and misinformation in the shortest possible time.
- The investor is CB ESPRI Impact One, a Slovak fund that supports companies and non-profit organizations that focus on protecting human rights.
We decided to invest in elv.ai because we believe that cultivating the online space improves the social atmosphere as a whole. As an impact fund, we are interested in the financial return and the positive impact on society. We welcome efforts to use technology to mitigate misinformation content on social media, which should serve to connect people, not spread hate. We see the potential of the elv.ai tool not only in the Czech and Slovak markets but also elsewhere in the European market. - says Miroslav Beblavý, CEO of the CB ESPRI Impact One Fund.
- Currently, Elv.ai is operating in Slovakia and the Czech Republic, where it is partnering with countries’ media and public institutions.
- According to data on the Elv.ai website, since its launch in Slovakia, the startup has flagged over 2.5 million harmful or false comments out of a total of 16 million, and it has identified more than 5,000 fake profiles. In the Czech Republic, out of 2 million comments tracked across 44 profiles, 504,000 were identified as hateful content, constituting 24%.
