AI-for enterprise developer CognitiveScale announced on Tuesday that it has raised another $15 million in capital, tipping the Austin-based company’s funding to $50 million since inception.
Returning investors Norwest Venture Partners, Intel Capital and Microsoft Ventures led the round. They were joined by new investors The Westly Group and USAA, which plans to deploy CognitiveScale’s tailored, augmented, predictive financial services to USAA’s 12 million customers and advisors.
Founded in 2013, CognitiveScale’s AI solutions continuously learn from user interactions and layers of data to offer risk-mitigated insights, mimicking a human’s ability to problem solve and learn over time. The company’s products support banks, insurance companies, healthcare providers, payers and patients, retailers and customers by making use of data that gets buried or goes undetected by the human eye.
When companies do partner with CognitiveScale, the process happens fast.
Following a 10-10-10 framework, CognitiveScale offers businesses the ability to choose and model their first cognitive system in 10 hours, infiltrate that system with their own data in 10 days and activate it within 10 weeks.
“CognitiveScale is the only AI company taking an industry-specific approach to the market,” said CEO Akshay Sabhikhi. “By tuning the algorithms so that they are specifically listening for, and learning from, industry-specific signals, CognitiveScale delivers software that brings value immediately, and only increases in value over time as the AI software continues learning from and adjusting to new data and user behavior.”
Today’s funding will be used to strengthen the existing platforms ENGAGE and AMPLIFY and to integrate with MSFT Azure. Additionally, the company will invest in both their own sales delivery and their partners’ like IBM and Deloitte who are taking CognitiveScale to market.
Funding hasn’t appeared to be an issue since launch, as investors continue to confirm CognitiveScale’s business strategy through investments. But one area that Sabhikhi said has caused some hurdles is finding candidates specific to this industry.
“One of the challenges we face is in hiring top talent for key roles like data scientists, data engineers and others,” said Sabhikhi.
He is not alone. The rise of data science jobs is expected to climb 647 percent by 2020.
To overcome that pain point, the company has partnered with professional organizations like AI-Austin and the University of Texas at Austin to help find top talent from the university and across the globe.
In similar news, CognitiveScale announced last month that Dr. Joydeep Ghosh, the Schlumberger Centennial Chair Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the UT Austin, joined the team as Chief Science Officer.
Image provided by CognitiveScale.
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