Saffron Technology, Inc., is a technology company headquartered in

Cary, North Carolina Cary is a town in Wake and Chatham counties in the U.S. state of North Carolina and is part of the Raleigh–Cary, NC Metropolitan Statistical Area. According to the 2020 Census, its population was 174,721, making it the seventh largest mun ...

, that develops cognitive computing systems that use incremental learning to understand and unify by entity (person, place or thing) the connections between an entity and other “things” in data, along with the context of their connections and their raw frequency counts. Saffron learns from all sources of data including

structured Structuring, also known as smurfing in banking jargon, is the practice of executing financial transactions such as making bank deposits in a specific pattern, calculated to avoid triggering financial institutions to file reports required by law ...

and unstructured data to support knowledge-based decision making. Its patented technology captures the connections between data points at the entity level and stores these connections in an associative memory. Similarity algorithms and

predictive analytics Predictive analytics encompasses a variety of statistical techniques from data mining, predictive modeling, and machine learning that analyze current and historical facts to make predictions about future or otherwise unknown events. In busine ...

are then combined with the associative index to identify patterns in the data. Saffron’s Natural Intelligence platform was utilized across industries including

manufacturing Manufacturing is the creation or production of goods with the help of equipment, labor, machines, tools, and chemical or biological processing or formulation. It is the essence of secondary sector of the economy. The term may refer to ...

energy In physics, energy (from Ancient Greek: ἐνέργεια, ''enérgeia'', “activity”) is the quantitative property that is transferred to a body or to a physical system, recognizable in the performance of work and in the form of hea ...

, defense and healthcare, to help decision-makers manage risks, identify opportunities and anticipate future outcomes, thus reducing cost and increasing productivity. Its competitors include

IBM Watson IBM Watson is a question-answering computer system capable of answering questions posed in natural language, developed in IBM's DeepQA project by a research team led by principal investigator David Ferrucci. Watson was named after IBM's founder ...

and Grok.

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the developers of the x86 seri ...

purchased the company in 2015, then shuttered it less than 3 years later.

History

Saffron was founded in 1999 by Dr Manuel Aparicio, and Mr. James Fleming. In 2000, former National Security Advisor Admiral (Dr.)

John Poindexter John Marlan Poindexter (born August 12, 1936) is a retired United States naval officer and Department of Defense official. He was Deputy National Security Advisor and National Security Advisor during the Reagan administration. He was convict ...

joined the board with a focus of applying Associative Memory technology in the fields of National Security and Intelligence. In the first years, the company did most of its work with the

U.S. Department of Defense The United States Department of Defense (DoD, USDOD or DOD) is an executive branch department of the federal government charged with coordinating and supervising all agencies and functions of the government directly related to national secur ...

, including in Iraq, analysing and predicting where IED’s would be located so insurgent bombers could be proactively targeted. In 2010, the analyst firm

Gartner Gartner, Inc is a technological research and consulting firm based in Stamford, Connecticut that conducts research on technology and shares this research both through private consulting as well as executive programs and conferences. Its client ...

identified Saffron as a "Cool Vendor" in Information Infrastructure for Enterprise Information Management In 2011, Forrester Research highlighted Saffron Technology as the leader of associative indexing in "The Dawning of a New Age in BI DBMS". On March 3, 2014 Saffron Technology raised a round of Series B funding. In October 2015,

bought Saffron Technology for an undisclosed price. Intel offered the licensed software with engineering services contracted to develop client applications and support ongoing use. In August 2018,

discontinued the Saffron software offering and supporting engineering services. Intel never issued a press release; it either reassigned or laid off all supporting staff and redirected the original URL to one that does not acknowledge Saffron's existence

Executives

Gayle Sheppard, chairman and chief executive officer; former executive at

PeopleSoft PeopleSoft, Inc. is a company that provides human resource management systems (HRMS), Financial Management Solutions (FMS), supply chain management (SCM), customer relationship management (CRM), and enterprise performance management (EPM) software ...

, Pleasanton, CA. and J.D. Edwards and Company, Denver, CO. Manuel Aparicio, Ph.D., chief memory maker and evangelist, former chief scientist at IBM Knowledge Management and Intelligent Agent Center, Raleigh, NC. James Fleming, chief software engineer, former software developer at IBM Knowledge Management and Intelligent Agent Center, Raleigh, NC.

National security

During the

Iraqi insurgency Iraqi insurgency may refer to: * Iraqi insurgency (2003–2011), part of the Iraq War ** Iraqi insurgency (2003–2006), 2003–2006 phase of the Iraqi insurgency ** Iraqi civil war (2006–2008), multi-sided civil war in Iraq * Iraqi insurgency (20 ...

Saffron was used by coalition forces in Iraq to help identify entities that were defined as people, places and things involved in insurgent networks. The tool mimicked human memory by recalling associations between those people, places and things. Unlike other tools, Saffron focused on context and frequency of association. Each word representing an entity in a set of data had its own memory about all the other words it had been used in association with. In this way, the tool could learn the way humans did. Saffron was contracted by

DARPA The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is a research and development agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of emerging technologies for use by the military. Originally known as the Ad ...

to work on Project Genoa.

Industry

Saffron's Natural Intelligence platform is utilized by Global 1000 companies across industries including

, defense and healthcare, to help decision-makers manage risks, identify opportunities and anticipate future outcomes, thus reducing cost and increasing productivity. A Global 100 manufacturing company uses Saffron Technology in a number of operational areas to leverage past engineering decisions and business experiences, such as component and part order optimization, failure root-cause analysis, and predictive maintenance.

References

{{Reflist Computer memory companies Intel acquisitions