IBM Watson Creator Raises $60M for Elemental Cognition AI

David Ferrucci, the artificial intelligence (AI) researcher who oversaw the development of IBM Watson, the question-answering supercomputer created by IBM, has raised nearly $60 million for his Elemental Cognition AI venture.

According to a filing dated August 17, the company has completed equity sales totaling $59.95 million from seventeen investors, with plans to raise an additional $5.75 million.

Elemental, headquartered in the Helmsley Building in New York, seeks to develop AI with advanced reasoning capabilities.

The company offers two enterprise chatbot solutions, Cogent and Cora, that are customized for a variety of applications, including finance, interactive travel planning, and scientific research automation.

Elemental Cognition emphasizes its unique hybrid AI platform, which combines large language models (LLMs) with an AI-driven reasoning engine to improve precision and controlled responses.

Although generative AI is not prominently featured on Elemental’s website, the company’s LinkedIn profile states:

“provides a revolutionary Generative AI platform with superior natural language understanding that powers expert problem-solving intelligence and research & discovery applications.”

Among Elemental Cognition’s leadership team are former IBM and Bridgewater executives, including David Shepler, Eric Brown, and Mike Barbora.

The company’s investors and advisors include Jim Breyer, Sam Palmisano, Greg Jensen, and Geoff Yang, among others. Ferrucci was the director of applied AI at Bridgewater Associates, and he spent 18 years at IBM.

During his tenure as leader of the IBM Watson team from 2006 to 2012, Watson’s victory on the television game show Jeopardy! demonstrated its capacity to comprehend and process natural language.

Despite initial promise, IBM Watson proved to be a loss-making venture. IBM sold Watson Health to Francisco Partners in 2020.

Recently, IBM introduced WatsonX, a training and deployment laboratory for machine learning models. The popularity of OpenAI’s ChatGPT has contributed to a rise in investor enthusiasm for AI ventures.

Elemental Cognition seeks to provide superior natural language comprehension for problem-solving and research applications, as well as advanced generative AI capabilities.