3 November 2019; Paddy Cosgrave, CEO & co-founder, Web Summit speaking to the media during The Gathering press conference at Universidade NOVA de Lisboa in Lisbon, Portugal. Photo by Sam Barnes/The Gathering via Sportsfile (Wikipedia)
Paddy Cosgrave, the Irish entrepreneur known for co-founding the Web Summit, a major annual technology conference, is not interested in parting ways with Ask-AI, an Israeli startup that uses Natural Language Processing NLP to power direct answer and insight surfacing platform. Cosgrave, who has frequently accused Israel of committing “war crimes” since the start of the Iron Swords War in Gaza, is refusing to divest from his stake in the company.
(Ask-AI raised $11 million in a Series A funding round this week.)
After the start of the war, Paddy Cosgrave posted comments on social media such as “War crimes are war crimes, even when committed by allies” and “Israel should adhere to international law and the Geneva Conventions — i.e., not commit war crimes.”
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Paddy Cosgrove was then forced to leave his role as the CEO of Web Summit in October 2023 and currently plays an advisory role.
At the time he stepped down, Paddy Cosgrove released a statement of regret saying, “Unfortunately, my personal comments have become a distraction from the event, and our team, our sponsors, our start-ups and the people who attend. I sincerely apologize again for any hurt I have caused.”
Founded in 2021 by CEO Alon Talmor, ASK-AI uses breakthrough AI-NLP to aggregate text-heavy company knowledge & customer communications, surfacing pinpointed answers to your questions and revealing product insights that would otherwise be undiscoverable.
Ask-AI’s platform allows managers and employees to receive answers and insights from all internal knowledge and customer communication sources. Current methods for receiving answers and insights are manual and time-consuming for entire organizations and Customer Experience teams in particular. Ask-AI improves this inefficient process by giving users pinpointed answers to questions instead of document links, in a way similar to Google Answers.
Ask-AI CEO Talmor is not happy with Paddy Cosgrave’s continued association with his firm.
“As somebody who serves in the army and 30% of our employees received emergency call-ups to serve as reservists,” said Talmor. “I am not prepared and it is not appropriate that somebody who talks in this way about Israel will be among the investors.”
