Interview with Francisco Webber, CEO of Cortical.io

June 16, 2021

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Today I am joined by Francisco Webber, co-founder and CEO of Cortical.io and inventor of the company’s proprietary Retina technology. This technology applies the principles of cerebral processing to machine learning and natural language understanding (NLU) to solve real-world use cases related to big text data. Cortical.io solutions are based on the actual meaning of the text, rather than on statistical occurrences.

Cortical.io enables businesses to more quickly, accurately and effectively search, extract, annotate and analyze information from unstructured text. These meaning-based solutions require little training data and are quickly implemented in enterprise environments Cortical.io is the secret weapon of management consultants and innovative organizations; its technology is disrupting market segments including contract analysis, message intelligence and intelligent document processing (IDP).

Francisco’s interest in information technology developed during his medical studies, when he was involved in the medical data processing. Over the course of two decades, he explored search engine technologies and documentation systems in various contexts but became increasingly frustrated with the limitations of state-of-the-art statistical methods.

In 2005 he founded Matrixware Information Services, which developed the first standardized global patent database. In 2007 he set up the Information Retrieval Facility with a leading academic expert in information retrieval Professor Keith van Rijsbergen. The Facility aimed at bridging the gap between academia and industry in the field of information retrieval.

Francisco recognized that the brain was the only existing reference system when it came to processing natural language. While closely following developments in neuroscience, he formulated his theory of Semantic Folding, which models how the brain represents language data