Highlights –

  • Bain Capital first to fund seed round for US-based startup Cambridge.
  • The AI-based start-up has helped one of the world’s largest computer technology companies increase its sales lead forecasting.
  • Akkio automates decision-making for business users by harnessing the power of ML and AI.

Akkio, the Cambridge based AI start-up aiming to build an AI platform for non-data scientists, has raised USD 3 million in seed funding, led by Bain Capital Ventures.

The two-year-old no-code platform was designed for teams without dedicated data science or developer resources. Its usage is as simple as uploading an excel spreadsheet to the cloud. The average training time is near to one minute, compared to the tools used from Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google, or Microsoft, which takes more than an hour. With minimum training time, Akkio’s model will out-perform other cloud giants.

Akkio was designed by the founders with a vision to make AI easily accessible to business users. The founders brought in their experience on UI (User Interface), ease of use from Sonos and deep technical expertise from Markforged, makers of a next-generation additive manufacturing platform.

Akkio provides benefits that go beyond other auto-ML (automated Machine Learning) offerings in its power and covers a wide range of AI use cases, including predictive analytics, intelligent process automation, forecasting, anomaly detection, data hygiene automation, and personalization.

The AI-based start-up has helped one of the world’s largest computer technology companies (unnamed) increase its sales lead forecasting, thus replacing a model development process that used to consume half a year, a team of developers and a dedicated AI specialist.

Other customers, too, have seen dramatic results using Akkio. With political fundraisers, people could donate for a cause with 87% accuracy, thus delivering significant efficiency gains after prioritizing donation call lists.

An SEO (Search Engine Optimization) vendor increased keyword selection results by about 25%, while a consumer electronics company reduced the time required to examine new product development comments by about 75%.

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.

Expert’s view

“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 heavyweight data science initiatives.”

“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 Abraham 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.”