Data science teams and machine learning models may now be the stuff of cutting-edge companies, but soon, they’ll be as normal as swivel chairs or conference lines.
But that doesn’t mean they’re as easy for businesses to put to use.
Jerusalem-based cnvrg.io created a full-stack platform that helps data scientists develop, test and deploy machine learning models that improve outcomes for the businesses they serve. Once the models are in production, they automatically fine tune themselves as new data comes in. As such, the software is more than an algorithm-maker, it’s what the company calls an “auto-adaptive machine learning pipeline.”
For example, mobile gaming company Playtika uses cnvrg.io to build machine learning models that use historical and incoming data to predict which users are about to churn, or stop playing, and serve them the offers most likely to keep them in the game.
Cnvrg.io announced today it raised $8 million in seed and Series A financing to launch an office in New York City.
“We chose New York as our first location outside of Israel because there are a lot of early adopters in New York for data science,” cofounder Yochay Ettun told Built In. “And, there are a lot of companies with a lot of data, like banks and insurance companies.”
There are currently just two employees in cnvrg.io’s new Soho space, but the company hopes to get to a team of five to 10 in the next year. They are actively hiring for sales roles, which the company calls solutions architects, Ettun said. The solutions architects have backgrounds in engineering or data science and can guide customers as they use cnvrg.io’s platform to tackle tough projects.
“I think machine learning is the best field to be in these days. Machine learning is going through what software development went through about 20 or 30 years ago,” Ettun said. “Our solutions architects get to be part of really interesting and cool projects which are on the cutting edge.”
Ettun and his co-founder Leah Kolben used to be data science consultants themselves. They saw the need for an easy-to-use, end-to-end platform, so they launched cnvrg.io in 2017. The startup tripled its customer count in the last year and now counts Fortune 500 companies among its clients.
Today’s funding announcement includes the company’s 2018 seed round led by Jerusalem Ventures Partners. The Series A was led by Hanaco VC. Cnvrg.io has also received investments from Skype’s founding investor Kevin Bermeister and Prashant Malik, co-creator of the Cassandra database management system.
