News Release

HALIFAX, NS., April 8 2021 – QRA Corp, an established leader in natural language processing for managing complex engineering requirements, announces the successful completion of a US$3 million financing round from Newfund Capital, Innovacorp, and BDC. 

The financing will enable QRA to expand its sales, marketing, and support teams to meet increased demands for their software solutions across North America and Europe. 

QRA is the developer of QVscribe, an industry-leading tool used by product design teams of large-scale, multi-billion dollar energy, infrastructure, and other complex engineering projects. 

QRA’s software inspects project requirement specifications and alerts product designers to potential errors as they occur. Detecting and correcting these errors saves millions of dollars in rework and redesign and has the potential to protect lives and avoid litigation by reducing product failures in the field. 

“We realized that most engineering problems aren’t caused by poor design, but instead are the result of poorly written, ambiguous requirements,” said Jordan Kyriakidis, QRA Corp CEO. “To solve this problem at the source, our solution applies multiple technologies, including natural language processing and language models to automatically check and verify requirements for clarity, consistency, and compliance against company and industry standards.” 

QVscribe allows product designers to be innovative and creative with their designs with an automated system that checks the requirements as they work to reduce errors and costs down the line. 

“We were impressed by the quality of the QRA team and its co-founders with remarkable and complementary scientific backgrounds,” said Henri Deshays, Partner at Newfund. “Another key differentiator lies in QRA’s unique machine reasoning approach applied to written technical requirements. Lastly, QRA’s focus on mission critical systems clearly sets them aside from other companies.”

As the increasing adoption of automation for manufacturing and coding continues, humans’ role in product design and specification is becoming even more critical. “The highest-value roles that humans will play are much earlier in the process,” said Kyriakidis. “Much of manufacturing and coding will be automated and commoditized; but getting the definitions, the intent, of what the system or product is required to do, the behavior it must have, these remain in the domain of humans and our technology will empower them to create requirements that are correct from the first specification.” 

‘’QRA’s software offers an added-value solution for businesses, helping them manage increasing complexity of systems in sectors like aerospace and industrial automation,’’ said Jérôme Nycz, Executive Vice President, BDC Capital. ‘’This financing, provided through BDC Capital’s Bridge Financing Program, will enable the company to build on their recognized expertise and continue on their accelerated growth path.’’