Akkio raises $15M to advance no-code AI platform for enterprises

Massachusetts-headquartered Akkio, a company offering a no-code platform to help enterprises deploy artificial intelligence (AI) in minutes, today announced $15 million in a series A funding round. The company said it will use the capital to accelerate the commercialization of its platform and deliver a powerful, easy-to-use AI assistant to anyone working with data.

“This investment allows us to scale and advance our platform so business analysts can leverage AI technologies to work faster, unlock new insights, and make a bigger impact for their organization,” Abe Parangi, cofounder and CEO of Akkio, said. 

The round, which was led by Bain Capital Ventures and Pandome, Inc., takes the total capital raised by Akkio to $18 million. It comes at a time when companies of all sizes are bullish on data and AI and looking for ways to drive maximum business value from them.

How does Akkio help?

Today, AI is the need of the hour, but taking advantage of its capabilities is difficult owing to the engineering complexities involved. Akkio tackles this challenge by providing enterprises with no-code tools to quickly build and deploy AI for tasks like churn reduction, attrition prediction, fraud detection and sales funnel optimization.

Users simply have to choose their dataset and train the neural network. Within minutes, the solution prepares the model, allowing users to ship ML-enabled workflows and features to power internal applications and tools critical to streamlining day-to-day operations and improving business outcomes. 

As part of the effort to simplify AI development and deployment, Akkio’s platform has also been enhanced with AI-driven capabilities that handle certain aspects of working with data. For example, its chat data prep feature allows users to automate data cleaning and preparation (combining columns, summarizing records and performing complex calculations) through natural language chat. This is a critical step before using the data for AI.

Then, with the new Chat Explore capability, data analysts can tap GPT-4 to directly chat with their data, identify patterns and instantly build live charts and visualizations. There’s also a Forecasting model that understands patterns in live data and creates forecasts predicting things like inventory availability and sales and marketing performance.

“A new wave of AI tools are enabling the long tail of business users to increase their impact due to consumer-level ease-of-use and design,” Ajay Agarwal, partner at Bain Capital Ventures, said. “Akkio’s generative AI platform for analytics is meeting the needs of analysts and consultants looking to harness the power of AI to become more impactful, making our second investment in the mission a no-brainer.”

Strong customer and competition base

Currently, Akkio claims that “hundreds of customers,” including Ellipsis Marketing, AngioDynamics and Standard Industries, use its offerings to use AI with their data to improve internal processes.

The no-code AI development space has been growing gradually, particularly in light of the pandemic and the shortage of data science talent. Other players operating in the same segment are Google AutoML, Obviously AI and Fritz AI.

Gartner predicts that 65% of app development will be low-code/no-code by 2024.