
Explosion is a software company specializing in developer tools and tailored solutions for Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing. They develop spaCy, a leading open-source Python library for advanced NLP designed for production use, and Prodigy, a modern annotation tool that enables efficient machine teaching and rapid iteration for training machine learning models. Explosion emphasizes usability, performance, and data privacy, offering open-source software and privacy-conscious components that do not require data to leave user servers. They also provide custom NLP consulting and implementation services by spaCy's core development team, focusing on data strategy, code review, NLP pipeline design, and annotation coaching. The company is bootstrapped, independent, and prioritizes stability over rapid scaling, with a client base including over 900 companies using Prodigy and a large community around spaCy with 390 million+ downloads and 31k+ GitHub stars.

Explosion is a software company specializing in developer tools and tailored solutions for Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing. They develop spaCy, a leading open-source Python library for advanced NLP designed for production use, and Prodigy, a modern annotation tool that enables efficient machine teaching and rapid iteration for training machine learning models. Explosion emphasizes usability, performance, and data privacy, offering open-source software and privacy-conscious components that do not require data to leave user servers. They also provide custom NLP consulting and implementation services by spaCy's core development team, focusing on data strategy, code review, NLP pipeline design, and annotation coaching. The company is bootstrapped, independent, and prioritizes stability over rapid scaling, with a client base including over 900 companies using Prodigy and a large community around spaCy with 390 million+ downloads and 31k+ GitHub stars.
Founded: By Ines Montani and Matthew Honnibal
Headquarters: Berlin
Flagship projects: spaCy (open-source NLP), Prodigy (annotation tool)
Business model: Developer tools, consulting, and commercial tooling around open-source NLP
Funding: $6M Series A led by SignalFire (Sept 2021); SignalFire stake increased to ~7.7% after a $3M follow-on in Jul 2022
Applied AI and Natural Language Processing for production systems.
Software / AI / Natural Language Processing
$6,000,000
SignalFire purchased 5% of the company for $6M; included warrants for additional investment. SignalFire later exercised part of the warrants with an additional $3M in July 2022, increasing ownership to ~7.7%.
“SignalFire lead investor; minority stake with warrants and partial warrant exercise increasing stake to ~7.7%”