There’s barely any aspect of our digital lives that are untouched by Artificial Intelligence. Be it shopping online or listening to music, AI or a subset of the technology is subsequently used to enable better services. However, enabling these services, which are based on and utilise AI is a different ballgame altogether. For example, going through an existing data set to find relevant correlations is as good as the model being used.
The Helsinki-based startup, Aito, offers predictive database for developers that is said to be an easier option, but also better. The company has now announced securing €1 million in pre-seed funding and that too by some of the honcho investors. Here’s what you need to know about the rapidly budding startup.
Fresh funding
The startup Aito has secured €1 million in pre-seed funding round, which was finalised last month. Alongside Futurice and the company’s own founders who are previous Aito.ai investors, five new investors pooled resources for the pre-seed round. Nokia Chairman Risto Siilasmaa invested in Aito via his investment company First Fellow Partners, along with Hermitage, UMO Capital, and additional funding from Business Finland.
While the service Aito provides is in private beta, the company has opened its next batch of applications for early bird users. The company aims at a public launch later this year and this latest round of funding will in its future research and development, and help its go-to-market strategy.
What is Aito.ai
The startup’s core offering is a predictive database for developers. It aims at replacing the currently used machine learning tools that are built for a specific task and are difficult to learn and use to find correlations and relevant insights. Aito’s predictive database not only enables users to search existing information to make predictions but also find hidden correlations and easily explain the results. Additionally, Aito says their service can be ”integrated into the user’s software as easy as integrating an SQL query.”
“We had a vision that equipped with proper tools a software developer is able to do a hell of a job and we started from what is very familiar to so many developers: the database. We are making a database that, using the known data, predicts the unknowns automatically,” says Aito’s Co-founder and Chief Data Scientist Antti Rauhala. Alongside Rauhala, the company was founded by Vesa-Pekka Grönfors and Kai Inkinen in April 2018.
The company’s revenue model is offering SaaS but the pricing depends on the size of a user’s data set and the volume of their queries. Pricing starts at €6 per day and there’s also a free trial period for those who want to test the service before jumping in.
Future plans
Aito already collaborates with companies like IKEA, Korkia and several other startups in Helsinki, London, Singapore, and San Francisco. However, with the new funding at hand, the company will bring the tech to the market publicly.
Vesa-Pekka Grönfors, CEO at Aito, says, “In the AI and ML world, dominated by big data discourse, we saw an opportunity to solve small data problems at scale, where companies are struggling to demonstrate return on investment with current tools. We cut the length of AI projects from months to weeks, the need from multiple data scientists into one developer, and provide the reasoning behind responses in speed and cost efficiency that no others can.”
Stay tuned to Silicon Canals for more updates in the tech startup world.
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