Bain Capital Ventures leads seed round for Cambridge, U.S.-based startup

Akkio, developers of an artificial intelligence (AI) platform for non-data scientists, announced the closing of a seed investment round of $3 million led by Bain Capital Ventures.

“Akkio is on a mission to automate decision-making for business users by harnessing the incredible power of machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence,” said Agarwal Ajay, Partner at Bain Capital Ventures. “What drew us to Akkio is their “no-code” solution which enables business users to generate business insights without relying on IT or on heavyweight data science initiatives.”

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Akkio is designed for teams without dedicated data science or developer resources. It’s as easy to use as uploading an excel spreadsheet to the cloud. The average training time on a model is as little as one minute, compared to more than an hour using tools from Google, AWS or Microsoft. And even with the short training time, Akkio’s models typically out-perform the cloud giants.

The founding team started Akkio to make AI accessible to business users. They brought their experience on UI and ease of use from Sonos and their deep technical expertise from Markforged, makers of a next generation additive manufacturing platform.

“Just as Windows and then Mac OS replaced typing obscure DOS commands into a black terminal screen with clickable icons, Akkio aims to open the world of artificial intelligence up to a wider market,” said Abe Parangi, CEO and co-founder of Akkio. “Feed it data and Akkio’s platform spits out predictions in seconds, giving anyone the power normally reserved for Fortune 50 companies or research institutions staffed by data scientists.”

The benefits of Akkio go beyond other auto-ML offerings in its power and how it covers a wide range of AI use cases, including intelligent process automation, predictive analytics, anomaly detection, forecasting, data hygiene automation, and personalization.

One of the world’s largest computer technology companies relies on Akkio to improve its sales lead forecasting, replacing a model development process that used to consume half a year of time, a team of developers and a dedicated AI specialist. They reduced their modeling time to one day.

Other customers leveraging Akkio have also seen dramatic results. A political fundraiser was able to model if people would donate to a cause with an 87% accuracy, delivering big efficiency gains by prioritizing call lists for donations. An SEO vendor improved keyword selection results by 25 percent, while a consumer electronics company cut the time to review new product development feedback time by 75 percent. In clinical trials – where therapeutic discovery can run from $12 million to $33 million per trial – a medical device manufacturer was able to predict clinical trial abandonment with 90 percent precision and flag trials most in danger of failing.

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