Probabl, a Paris-based startup operating one of the most popular toolkits worldwide to build machine learning models, has raised a €13m equity seed round bringing total funding for the company to €18.5m.
The round was co-led by French VC Serena and hedge fund Capital Fund Management. It included support from Mozilla Ventures and sovereign wealth fund French Tech Souveraineté.
Probabl was founded in 2023 to operate and support scikit-learn, an open-source machine learning library developed by researchers at Inria, the French national institute for research in tech and digital science.
Launched publicly in 2010, scikit-learn provides open-source tools to help data scientists build machine learning models. It has been downloaded 2.5bn times to date and deployed in companies globally ranging from Spotify and Booking.com to JP Morgan and BNP Paribas.
From Inria to Probabl
In 2022, as part of its national strategy for AI, the French government mandated Inria to ensure the continuous development and support of scikit-learn, considered a critical pillar of tech sovereignty.
“Scikit-learn is an important asset that needs financing, so there was a desire to place it in an economic model,” says Probabl cofounder Yann Lechelle. “This is why they came to me, an entrepreneur.”
Lechelle, a repeat founder who also spent some time as CEO of French cloud provider Scaleway, teamed up with 12 other cofounders (largely Inria researchers who have worked on building scikit-learn) to launch Probabl. The startup is now the exclusive operator of the machine learning toolkit and is building products on top of the library in order to monetise the technology.
The company recently launched its first premium product, Skore, which provides a range of support services for teams of data scientists in enterprises, to help them manage and optimise the deployment of machine learning models. Skore is currently being tested in beta by several clients, according to Lechelle.
Cohabiting with the government
Probabl is legally a “mission-driven” company, meaning it is set up to pursue a specific sustainability-oriented goal. The French government and Inria are both shareholders alongside private funds.
Lechelle says this particular governance setup is to ensure scikit-learn remains open source. “We won’t change the licence,” says Lechelle. “We are adding to scikit-learn, not taking away from it.”
But this made Probabl a hard sell for most VCs, according to Lechelle. “It wasn’t easy to convince private investors to believe in this cohabitation,” he says. “They thought it would be too complicated politically.”
“But the objective is that the project succeeds like any commercial enterprise… And nothing is stopping us from being extremely ambitious.”
