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LexRockAI -  Developing products that use AI to meet the needs of four industrial fields: legal, insurances, financial, and regulatory compliance

LexRockAI - Developing products that use AI to meet the needs of four industrial fields: legal, insurances, financial, and regulatory compliance

Artificial Intelligence has gained a lot of momentum in the past few years and has percolated into almost every field. It has changed the industry in a revolutionary way. As it expands understanding, reasoning, planning, communication, and perception beyond human capabilities, it can significantly increase efficiency and reduce operating costs.

LexRockAI is a startup with a solid foundation, particularly in natural language processing (NLP) and information research (IR). It develops algorithms and products capable of locating, identifying, and extracting relevant information within documents. We interviewed Alain Lavoie, the CEO of Irosoft and LexRockAI, where he explains to us about his latest venture, LexRockAI. Here are a few important snippets of the interview:

Brief us about the history of LexRockAI. Was there any prior experience that led to the establishment of the company?

The LexRockAI story has its origins in an idea that was born in mid-2015 at Irosoft. We are a spin-off of Irosoft. A company specialized in the world of ‘Text’ and ‘Documents’ using Natural Language Processing (NLP), Information Retrieval (IR), and Information Extraction (IE) since its foundation in 1995. We have been recognized worldwide for over 20 years as NLP and information management experts, mainly in the legal sector.

Due to our extensive experience in the field, we decided to focus our efforts on four sectors: Finance, Insurance, Legal and regulatory compliance. Since 2015, we have followed a long process of trial and error and technological advances supported by investments of US$5 million in a unique technology platform. Today, in 2021, we have a platform offering unique products that enable our target clients worldwide to solve fundamental problems. Officially founded in 2019, LexRockAI is today very well positioned to be a global leader in the world of ‘Text’ and ‘Documents’ task assistance and analysis tools.

What’s the greatest challenge your company has faced? How did you overcome it?

It is essential to specify that all efforts were financed from Irosoft’s assets and profits. As mentioned, US$5 million in equity was invested in the development of LexRockAI. To answer your question: Our greatest challenge was to have the financial means to achieve our ambitions. This decision to wait until we have a market-ready platform before seeking external funding has sometimes caused us difficulties. But there was no lack of ideas, and since we have one of the best teams of AI experts in the industry, our reputation in the Canadian ecosystem has allowed us to recruit and develop a very talented team. Today, we are in the process of seeking funding to increase our market position. We have demonstrated that LexRockAI has a unique and immediately deployable technology platform.

LexRock AI develops decision support tools through artificial intelligence to highlight unstructured textual data in documents. How effectively do you address your customers’ pain points per this?

We have succeeded in designing a platform that can “Search, locate, retrieve and compare any type of data from any document at the speed of AI.” It is a platform that allows any professional to train his own model with his data without any AI algorithmic knowledge. Our platform accelerates productivity, improves performance and organizational quality while significantly reducing the cost to process text and documents. Some of our customers have saved up to 90% in time. What used to take several hours now only takes a few minutes.

LexRock AI initiates the development of platforms using AI to meet the needs of four industrial sectors (financial, legal, insurance, and regulatory compliance) in task-based tools for legal professionals and non-professionals. How do you interpret this further?

If I use an analogy, basically, LexRockAI designs glasses using specialized lenses (software) to read documents. However, we had to make choices based on our three criteria: 1) Magnitude of the industry; 2) Magnitude of competition in the industry; 3) Impact of our technologies in the market segment. In this context, our plan to date has been to focus on designing and marketing specialized lenses (software) for the financial, insurance, and legal sectors. Our solutions enable our customers to be more productive at a lower cost. This is the plan we have and the focus we want to keep for now.

What are the various services your company offers?

As the optician who assists his clients in the proper fitting of their glasses, we offer specialized services to help our clients with specific demands regarding the platform. We can help our clients configure the platform, integrate it into corporate mission systems, or develop specialized training programs. We work with our clients to adapt our platform to their needs and train their teams to become independent as quickly as possible.

What new endeavors is your company currently undertaking?

Currently, our focus is the commercialization of the platform in order to contribute to our clients’ business objectives. Our short-term objectives are :

  • To increase the customer base, deploy the platform and carry out several customer projects in parallel;
  • To sign collaboration agreements on the various territories targeted;
  • To complete a round of financing by the end of 2021. Several investors have expressed interest;
  • To open a subsidiary in Europe in 2021 and in the United States in 2022.

About the future, where do you think your company will be in five years?

Firstly, in our long-term vision, we consider AI models to only be a commodity (5 - 8 years horizon). While the models will remain important and necessary, the energy will be focused on the development of specialized applications (customer-centric). Secondly, data will remain the focus for model performance.

Let me use another analogy to explain our strategy and where we want to be in five years and most likely before: “During the Klondike Gold Rush, where about 100,000 prospectors were attracted to the Klondike region, only about 4,000 of them found gold. Nevertheless, merchants who sold prospectors sieves and shovels to locate gold nuggets made a lot of money.” We want to put the LexRockAI platform at the same level as the merchants’ sieves and shovels by providing a platform for screening unstructured documents to extract useful and valuable information (gold nuggets) for both humans and AI algorithms and models. We want to position ourselves among the world leaders in this very specialized market.

Meet the CEO

Alain Lavoie is the CEO, President, and Co-Founder of Irosoft and LexRockAI. With a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and computer science and a Master’s degree in operations research (1989) from DIRO at the Université de Montréal, he worked on research projects in the department until his company was founded in 1995.

Alain has been actively involved in the ICT ecosystem in Quebec for nearly 20 years. He is a member of many boards of directors and committees. He is mainly known for defending SMEs’ interests in information technology while promoting the sector of ICT. He is also involved as a speaker in many conferences to raise awareness and democratize artificial intelligence (AI).


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