About us

Explosion is a software company specializing in developer tools and services for Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing. We’re the makers of spaCy, one of the leading open-source libraries for advanced NLP and Prodigy, an annotation tool for radically efficient machine teaching.

We believe...

  1. Artificial Intelligence is not magic. The technology is only useful if it’s easy to understand.
  2. The best AI products won’t be built from boxed solutions. Developers need custom models and transparent tools, not just cloud services.
  3. AI software needs better developer and user experience. This requires hybrid skill sets and radical attention to detail.
  4. If you ship it, you should own it. We believe in taking responsibility for our software, and letting you do the same.
  5. Technology should be accessible. We want to provide the most value with open-source software. That's why we’ve built spaCy and our other tools and libraries.
  6. We're not your typical startup. We’re boot­strapped, independent and put stability over moonshots.

Explosion was founded by

Matthew Honnibal

Matthew Honnibal

  • CTO, Founder
    • Berlin, Germany
Ines Montani

Ines Montani

  • CEO, Founder
    • Berlin, Germany

Who owns Explosion

In August 2021 we sold 5% of Explosion to SignalFire for $6 million, with warrants for a further 10% at the same valuation. Employees are given a stake in Explosion using a virtual share bonus program. In July 2022, SignalFire exercised part of their warrants by investing a further $3 million to increase their stake in the company. In 2024 we went back to running Explosion as an as an independent-minded self-sufficient company and are not seeking further venture funding. SignalFire continue to own 7.7% of the company.

Employee Pool9.8%SignalFire7.7%Matthew Honnibal49.5%Ines Montani33%