Israeli startup Iguazio announced today the close of a $24 million funding round to accelerate its growth and expand the reach of its data science platform to new global markets. Their platform automates machine learning pipelines, enabling a wide range of industries to bring their data science to life.
The funding round was led by INCapital Ventures, with participation from existing and new investors, including Samsung SDS, Kensington Capital Partners, Plaza Ventures and Silverton Capital Ventures. This investment brings Iguazio’s total funding to $72 million.
Iguazio was founded in 2014 by Asaf Somekh, Yaron Haviv and Yaron Segev to lighten the burden enterprises face when building and implementing their AI applications. “When you look at the data, 87% of all the AI models that are successful in the lab environment never materialize in the real world” explained Somekh. “Whether it’s a machine learning model with 500 or 10,000 data points, people tend to underestimate the complexity to deploy real world AI applications. Even large enterprises such banks and telco’s struggle to run AI that brings business value at scale.”
Iguazio developed a data science platform to build fully operational AI applications. Their platform is threefold, offering pipeline orchestration tools, serverless functions and services for automation, and a multi-model data layer. From data collection, exploration, model accuracy to real-time inferencing, Iguazio’s platform simplifies the process of deploying operational AI models.
“If you want to run a TensorFlow service as a part of your pipeline during model training, through the click of a button, the Iguazio platform will build it for you automatically, and use the GPUs in a very efficient way” explained Somekh. “Then you can take the AI model and easily build a robust and scalable production pipeline through the platform’s services running in the cloud or on-prem with the same user experience.”
The startup recently announced that digital payments company Payoneer has deployed Iguazio to predict and prevent fraud with real-time machine learning models, which uniquely adjust to the changing patterns of fraud hackers, in real-time and at scale with billions of transactions per month. Their platform is deployed by many verticals, like financial services, manufacturing, gaming, airports and telecom providers in real-time use cases, such as self-healing networks, smart mobility, logistics optimization, and real-time recommendations. Some of which are being processed at the edge (where you can place servers), with low latency and closer proximity to the sources. “Given that our software can run at a small footprint at the edge, we see great value in being able to combine cloud to on premise and deliver the same user experience, whether in AWS, Azure, or in their own data center” said Somekh.
“Iguazio’s unique technology facilitates the data science creation process from start to finish, enabling enterprises to deploy AI applications that create real business impact,” said Tom Kennedy, Chairman of Kensington Capital Partners. “With the opportunities we are seeing for machine learning technology and the global success stories emerging from this high-tech nation, Iguazio represents a great first investment for Kensington in an Israeli company.”
“This is a pivotal time for AI” said Somekh. “Our platform helps data scientists push the limits of their real-time AI applications and see their impact in real business environments. With support from INCapital, Kensington Capital Partners, and our other investors, we are ready to expand our international team and reach our ambitious goals.”
See Iguazio’s open positions here: https://www.iguazio.com/careers/
