This Bengaluru startup aims to help firms become data smart and intelligent using AI and ML

Chethan KR and Ashish Koushik were working together at MSys Technologies, an IT services firm, where they helped large product companies and enterprises with digital transformation.

They realised that though these companies aligned towards automation, cloud analytics, and machine learning, they were not ready for artificial intelligence (AI). Some of the challenges the duo saw in getting companies adopt AI or data driven decision making was the huge volume of data, siloed teams within organisations, legacy old infrastructure, and skill-gap for right data technology talents.

AI being the forefront for future and to bridge the current skill gaps in data science, Chethan and Ashish started SynctacticAI in February 2019. It is an end-to-end platform that handles the entire data life cycle management of a company, and helps build smarter businesses at scale. 

The platform helps anyone connect their data sources, define workflows, visualise insights, and build AI/ML models. Teams can also collaborate with each other while working on a single source for all their data needs.

“We believe data is the next digital revolution, which will be bigger and more disruptive than the web. We want to help business leaders bring data-driven initiatives to life, without adding pressure on teams, budgets, or technological choices,” says Chethan.

At present, SynctacticAI claims to be having a customer base of more than 50 percent in the US market, 25 percent in Singapore, and remaining in India and rest of the world.

Some of its prominent clients include Shriram Finance, Chef Social and Local Ferment Co from India, WuupTo from UK and Cube Monk from the US.

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What does it do?

Synctactic is a horizontal platform that is domain agnostic. The platform can be deployed on-premise, on-cloud, or even in hybrid multi-cloud setups, irrespective of industry or use case.

The centralised data platform democratises the use of data science, machine learning, and AI. The platform also claims to empower businesses to move along their data journey - from data preparation to analytics to scale to enterprise AI.

The platform also provides a common ground of data experts and explorers, a repository of best practices, shortcuts to machine learning and AI deployment/management, and a centralised and controlled environment for data-powered companies.

“We at SynctacticAI help businesses turn their data sets into actionable insights using machine learning. Our platform connects various storage systems and databases, and cleans your data set, structures it, and builds machine learning models. Our strategy to handle the entire data science cycle from start to end with a single platform makes us stand out,” says Chethan. 

The startup mainly targets two categories - companies which have not yet started applying data driven thinking in the organisation, and the companies that are actively pursuing data driven thinking.

“Each of these two categories are industry agnostic and organisation size agnostic. However, as a go-to market strategy, we have decided to start with ‘fintech, IoT, and retail’ as the target industry, where we will be targeting companies that have started operations, have a good amount of data they want to understand and analyse their data,” explains Chethan.

SynctacticAI also targets larger organisations, which are already running their data operations with open source or cloud native stacks, and helps them move into its solution where it would address their current pain points by providing a simple, user-friendly solution which will deliver results and is cost effective.

Currently, the company, with a team size of 12, claims its customers are seeing 30 percent increase in operational efficiency and more than 50 percent better decision making and customer engagement from the insights derived through its platform at a cost less than half of hiring an entire data team. 

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The market and business model

According to Market Research, the data management platform is expected to reach $3 billion globally by 2023 with 15 percent CAGR between 2017 and 2023.

Talking about the USP compared to its competitors such as Zendrive and vPhrase, Chethan explains,

“We can set up the data infrastructure within a couple of hours, which would otherwise take weeks’ time. Our platform gives the flexibility to set up the platform without any technical team in place to start deriving analytics. We also have a hybrid multi-cloud, which works on AWS, GCP, AZURE, or even on premises giving the flexibility to organisation to choose the right storage / cloud systems intern saving cost at a great extent.”

SynctacticAI’s pricing model is governed by a simple subscription pricing, which is based on plans designed as per the compute and storage required. Each plan has a cap of maximum compute and storage, and can be easily upgraded when one exceeds those limits.

The platform raised $300,000 in an angel round from undisclosed investors in 2019, and is currently looking to raise $1 million in Seed round. The team claims its revenue to be growing at 75 percent month on month.

Apart from fundraising, the company is also looking at adding more customers to the platform across North America, Singapore, Middle East, and India.

Commenting on the future projects, Chethan says,

“Our mission is to get organisations data ready for AI disruption, and then look at bringing in Auto ML to the platform, and enabling organisations to choose the right models required for their AI computation. Further, we are looking at academia angle to the platform by further strengthening our relationship with Northeastern University, Boston, to be an integral part of their AI and analytics research initiatives.”

(Edited by Megha Reddy)