- Belgian startup Timefold has raised $6.7 million to power its AI scheduling platform.
- Timefold uses AI to optimize planning in industries like transportation and logistics.
- Venture capital fund Lakestar led the funding round as Timefold plans to expand its marketing efforts.
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Timefold, a Belgian startup that uses AI to help companies create work plans such as employee shift schedules, has raised $6.7 million in funding.
The co-founders of Ghent, Belgium-based Timefold believe that major industries such as transportation, logistics and supply chain businesses can all improve their complex infrastructure.
“Planning is everywhere, often out of sight, yet efficient schedules are rare,” said Geoffrey De Smet, CTO and co-founder of Timefold, in the announcement. “From the field service technician coming in to fix your boiler to the plane assigned to the next flight, schedules run the world. We’re tackling complex planning problems by providing an out-of-the-box planning model that’s easy for IT teams to run, test, and configure.”
Timefold develops software that analyzes companies’ data and provides planning models using a proprietary algorithm based on the open-source OptaPlanner project. The startup says it can solve problems like last-mile delivery routing and maintenance scheduling. Timefold has partnered with companies such as Deutsche Bahn and Palantir, according to the startup’s presentation materials.
“There are middle grounds where existing solutions don’t fit, so our platform has created a broader, extensible system,” Timefold CCO Frederic Demetz told Business Insider in an interview. He added that while it’s AI, it’s not a large-scale language model or machine learning algorithm. Instead, Timefold feeds “constraints and data” into the platform, which then “uses heuristics to provide solutions.”
Venture capital firm Lakestar led Timefold’s funding alongside existing investor Smartfin, which will use the money to expand the company’s platform and marketing costs, as it plans to grow its headcount to around 40 this year.
Check out Timefold’s 15-slide presentation below: