Small Business Awards 2020

John Snow Labs is an AI and NLP company that acts as an accelerator for the data science community, by providing state-of-the-art natural language processing software and models. Following the company’s recognition as the winner of our Healthcare & Life Science award, we took a closer look at the team’s expertise and achievements. Founded in 2015 and having a team of under 100 people, John Snow Labs is a prime example of how small businesses all over the world are wielding innovation, disruption, and creativity to make a real difference in the industries they serve. In under three years, the company’s open-source Spark NLP library has become the most widely used natural language processing library used by practitioners globally – making the most recent research advances in deep learning and transfer learning readily available to the AI community. 2020 has thrust the healthcare and life science industries into the spotlight. Strengths have been applauded. Weaknesses have been blown up under a microscope. 2020 has acted as a catalyst, highlighting how critical every aspect of the healthcare ecosystem is to modern life and modern business. John Snow Labs was created to accelerate the adoption of AI in healthcare – to empower the modern equivalents of its Victorian-era namesake. During 2020, it handled a 9-fold increase in the adoption of Spark NLP. John Snow Labs’ culture is centred on customer success. With customers including some of the world’s largest and most demanding enterprises such as Roche, Kaiser Permanente, Merck, McKesson, and Novartis – getting a system to production requires more than licensing software. Acting as consultants and problem solvers, the team guides customers from laying the right foundation and setting expectations – all the way ensuring the product management, security, privacy, and operations are all managed and actioned to scale. Providing this combination of licensed software and specialized consulting is one way the team has distinguished itself – and consistently delivered successful enterprise-scale systems. In an industry where 80% of AI projects fail to deliver, John Snow Labs bucks the trend by combining data science, software engineering, and clinical experts, who collaborate using a proven process. Most team members have at least Master’s degrees and a third have PhDs or MDs – ensuring customers that their needs are understood and anticipated. The NLP market is expected to grow from $10.2 billion in 2019 to $26.4 billion by 2024. This industry, like many that utilise technology, is occupied in a constant arms race. The latest technology, product or solution can quickly become obsolete. This fact puts John Snow Labs’ enduring success in greater relief, acting as testament to the strength of its team and culture. The team has released 26 new software versions in each of the past three years, outpacing its competition and delivering on its promise to its customers and community: Always be providing the most accurate results in history, no matter how fast moving the state of the art is. Education is one of John Snow Labs’ cornerstones and will remain so as it looks to lead the NLP industry and help the community grow. The company has created and hosted the first NLP Summit – a conference attended by over 6,500 people who heard 50 technical sessions. The program represented a diversity of open-source libraries, commercial offerings, industry use cases and best practices. The first Healthcare NLP Summit is scheduled for April 2021. If 2020 has shown us anything, it is that colossal change can come from anywhere. John Snow Labs is sure to be a gamechanger in the years ahead. Company: John Snow Labs Website: https://www.johnsnowlabs.com/ Oct20262 Small Business Awards 2020 83 Best Healthcare & Life Science AI Development Firm - USA “John Snow Labs is the primary provider of NLP software to the AI industry. Its mission is to help healthcare & life science innovators build real-world AI systems - by turning recent scientific advances into production grade software.” “We’re one of the only AI companies with a proven public track record of making healthcare and life science companies successful in putting NLP systems into production. There’s a big difference between a prototype or research paper and having a dependable, scalable, secure, and accurate production AI system.”