About us

Explosion is a software company specializing in developer tools 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.

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.

Board Members

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  Matthew Honnibal CTO, Founder

  Matthew is a leading expert in AI technology. He completed his PhD in 2009, and spent a further 5 years publishing research on state-of-the-art NLP systems. He left academia in 2014 to write spaCy and found Explosion.

  • Berlin, Germany
• 

  Ines Montani CEO, Founder

  Ines is a co-founder of Explosion and a core developer of the spaCy NLP library and the Prodigy annotation tool. She has helped set a new standard for user experience in developer tools for AI engineers and researchers.

  • Berlin, Germany
• 

  Oana Olteanu SignalFire

  • San Francisco, CA, U.S.