A Finnish start-up targets to create a new global standard how social media is moderated. Vendep Capital and Tekes, Finnish Funding Agency for Innovation, invest 1.2M euro in a common endeavour to grow globally and change the way how online moderation is done.

Utopia Analytics, a house of AI-doctors and computational linguists, has for some time been solving one of the most difficult questions of our time: what to do with illicit content, online frauds and cyber bullying roaming free throughout the internet? Shutting down discussion and sales platforms cannot be an option, as such hasty decision would set freedom and democracy back by decades.

One of the biggest challenges of our time has been solved with Utopia AI Moderator, a fully automated real-time moderation tool, and a scalable SaaS service based on artificial intelligence and machine learning. Launched in mid 2016, the tool has quickly increased the quality of user-generated content and relieved many service providers from a great deal of their human moderation work. In Finland, the largest online marketplace Tori.fi by Schibsted Media Group Finland and the largest discussion platform Suomi24.fi by Aller Media are among the customers.

“Our technology works with any language and it’s already being used in several countries. Furthermore, this solution is very easy to scale up. This is the point where the long groundwork pays off, and we can finally make the service more widely available around the world. In 2018, we will be starting operations in several countries.” states Dr. Mari-Sanna Paukkeri, CEO and co-founder of Utopia Analytics.

A Finnish venture capital fund Vendep Capital provides muscles to make this solution global. “We at Vendep Capital invest in the best SaaS teams in Finland that have a solid plan in scaling further. Utopia took a problem everyone knows, and chose a completely different entry point to solve this problem.” states Jupe Arala, General Partner at Vendep Capital.