Translation Startup Taps into Toronto's PhD Community and Machine Learning to Help Scientists Communicate – StartUp HERE Toronto

If a choir of the Greater Toronto Area's nearly six million voices were to speak at once you'd hear 140 languages and dialects each with its own cadence and cultural nuance. This is why Anthony Lee stays here. It's also one of the reasons the Toronto-based startup he co-founded called Knowtions – which combines machine learning with a 500-strong PhD-trained community to translate patents and academic articles in the life sciences industry – is thriving. Anthony left home at 17 and spent several years in Newfoundland paying his way through university by doing translation work on the side. "When I transferred from Memorial University to University of Toronto, that's when I really started to think more about how I could use this experience," says Lee. It was also where he met his eventual co-founder Christina Cai and the pair started to muse about the business case for Knowtions, launching the business in 2013.