Sunday, November 16, 2014

Scaled Inference, a cloud AI startup by ex-Googlers, gets Khosla Ventures $8M funding

By Vasudev Ram



Saw the news via this tweet by @asenkut - Aydin Senkut, Google's first product manager, and founder of Felicis Ventures.

Here is a TechCrunch article about the funding of Scaled Inference by Khosla Ventures:

Excerpts from the article:

[
Scaled Inference, a startup founded by two ex-Googlers that is building a cloud-based platform for third parties that want to use artificial intelligence and machine learning tools to run their apps and services – has raised another round of funding to continue its development and hiring, a Series A round of $8 million from Khosla Ventures.
...
has been putting together some of the first products (or services) that will run on top of that platform: pattern recognition, anomaly detection, prediction, and predictive ranking, which will be accessible by developers by way of a set of APIs.
...
As an example of where pattern recognition might be applied, he says, take a bank or credit card company like Visa.
...
“The pattern recognition APIs can then be used to detect correlations such as increased spending during certain time periods, at certain locations, by certain customers, on certain items, for certain combinations of these attributes,” he says. In turn, this type of insight can help guide important business decisions
...
this is a long-term vision, but this is one of the reasons that Scaled Inference went with the investors that it has done, Sercinoglu says. “Vinod Khosla is a long term investor, one of the longest-term thinkers in the business, and ours is a long term vision for AI and machine learning. That really resonated with him.”

Longer term, he says, “We seek to offer the same powerful technology as a public cloud API to everyone and for virtually any application; anything from personalized magazines to intelligent context-sensitive address books, app launchers, e-commerce sites,
]
They are not open to the public yet.

The idea seems interesting, not just for the applications mentioned, but also for the fact that they plan to offer the service as a public cloud API, available to everyone, so looks like it could have a lot of potential.

- Vasudev Ram - Dancing Bison Enterprises

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