SAP SE has announced that its investment arm, SAP.iO Fund, has backed Jina AI, a Berlin-based company providing an open source neural search solution.
Jina AI combines recent advances in machine learning for computer vision, speech recognition and natural language processing into a new search platform to provide greater accuracy, flexibility and adaptivity to search inputs.
The core project of Jina AI is called Jina on GitHub, allowing users to create a cloud-native search solution powered by deep learning in just minutes. Jina slashes from months to minutes the time it takes to build a production-ready neural search system well suited to business environments that require a fast and lightweight development cycle. Since its release on GitHub in May 2020, this project already has attracted more than 2,000 commits from 48 contributors worldwide. As of now, Jina supports searching text, image, video, audio and cross-modality data, with support for more data types coming in the future.
“As companies accelerate their digital transformations, a clear need has emerged for better, more accurate enterprise search,” said Ram Jambunathan, SAP senior vice president and managing director of SAP.iO. “We are excited by Jina AI’s potential to provide a highly accurate search solution for SAP customers.”
Jina AI was founded by Dr. Han Xiao, who is well known for the development of the next-gen search infrastructure for Tencent’s messaging app, WeChat. He also is noted for his leadership with Tencent’s Open Source Program Office, where he fostered the company’s open source and dev-ops culture. Xiao served as a board member at Linux Foundation AI in 2019 and is founder and chairman of the German-Chinese Association of AI.
