POELLATH advises UNICEPTA on acquisition of Berlin-based AI start-up Giance

The company thus expands its capabilities in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) to develop new business segments with solutions for the automated recognition of specific events and scenarios.

Giance Technologies is backed by founder Prof. Dr. Hans Uszkoreit, one of the world’s pioneers in artificial intelligence and co-founder and scientific director of the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz DFKI).

Using the Natural Language Understanding method he developed for extracting knowledge from texts, Giance Technologies recognizes and understands the relevant facts about specific events from more than 400 million Internet sources and forwards these as simple and unequivocal signals to the respective recipient groups. This new technology enables companies to identify and respond to operational risks and incidents very promptly, for example within supply chains or during extreme weather events. The same applies to events related to ESG criteria and compliance requirements or within the scope of M&A activities, where corporate communications are also increasingly used to assess potential reputational risks.

Within the UNICEPTA Group, Giance Technologies will form the technological center for research and development, together with Ubermetrics Technologies.

UNICEPTA’s customers include about two-thirds of the DAX-40 companies, as well as international corporations and organizations such as British Airways, FIFA, IOC, Roche and Stellantis. The UNICEPTA Group has approximately 500 employees in Europe, the U.S. and Asia.

POELLATH provided comprehensive legal advice to UNICEPTA within the context of the acquisition with the following Munich team:

• Tobias Jäger (partner, lead, M&A/private equity, Munich).
• Andrea Streifeneder (senior associate, M&A/private equity, Munich)
• Dr. Matthias Meier (associate, M&A/private equity, Munich)