Three scientists became overnight multimillionaires when their firm floated on the stock exchange
Arria NLG hit a value of £150million when it made its debut on the Alternative Investment Market (Aim).
Each of the four original founders own small stakes in the firm – enough to make them millionaires several times over.
The company was founded just four years ago as a spin-out from Aberdeen University, which also owns a 5% stake. But its technology is based on research carried out over more than 20 years.
One of the founders is Professor Ehud Reiter, who arrived at Aberdeen University in 1995. He had completed his PhD in computer science, specialising in “natural language generation” (NLG) – a field of study centred on getting computer programmes to produce readable text in an ordinary language – at Harvard University in the US.
He and Ian Davy, a meterologist and businessman, began working together on NLG projects.
They recruited Dr Somayajulu Sripada to join their research project. Along with Aberdeen-based John Perry, they founded Data2Text, which successfully developed software which translated massive amounts of data to intelligible language reports.
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