Analytics startup Unsupervised raises $35M

Unsupervised, a big data analytics company leveraging AI to find patterns in business data, today announced that it raised $35 million in a series B round led by Cathay Innovation and Signalfire.

Unsupervised says that it intends to use the funding to hire additional employees as it continues to develop its platform. Most enterprises have to wrangle countless data buckets, some of which inevitably become underused or forgotten. A Forrester survey found that between 60% and 73% of all data within corporations is never analyzed for insights or larger trends. The opportunity cost of this unused data is substantial, with a Veritas report pegging it at $3.3 trillion by 2020. That’s perhaps why the corporate sector has taken an interest in solutions that ingest, understand, organize, and act on digital content from multiple digital sources.

Customers at all stages of data maturity — from the Fortune 50 through the Fortune 5000 — have discovered over $52 million in opportunities to optimize their business in the first few months of 2021 with Unsupervised’s AI platform. This funding will accelerate both Unsupervised’s market growth and product roadmap, delivering even greater impact to more organizations.

“We’re on a mission to move customers from reactively using data to becoming data profitable,” said Noah Horton, CEO and co-founder of Unsupervised. “Finding and identifying insights is typically a laborious process, which is why the vast majority of an enterprise’s data never gets analyzed. Having gone through a series of ‘black swan’ events recently, organizations realize the need to uncover and act on insights faster. Unsupervised is providing customers a new way to turn data into actual money.”

Unsupervised’s singular end-to-end platform unlocks value in data for business teams. This includes automating tasks that typically require months and manual resources, such as data preparation, aggregation, feature engineering, and insight discovery. The platform not only accelerates analytical efforts by months, but frees people to focus on acting on uncovered insights, rather than the onerous process of trying to find them.

Examples of common use cases where the technology is in-use today include:

• Generating new revenue streams
• Optimizing customer retention and preventing churn
• Improving customer satisfaction
• Lowering the costs of customer acquisition
• Optimizing supply chain, distribution, and logistics
• Identifying and mitigating financial risks, among other examples

“Unsupervised is pioneering AI augmented analytics and disrupting the way companies harness the power of Big Data with a new approach that is holistic and efficient with real, trackable value,” said Denis Barrier, Co-founder & CEO at Cathay Innovation. “We work closely with many of the world’s largest corporations and believe that Unsupervised’s game-changing tool addresses critical pain points for data and business teams that are understaffed and overwhelmed by today’s massive data growing pains. We’re honored to join their journey as they look to scale further and transform decision-making in the enterprise.”

Unsupervised plans to use the new funding to fuel key growth initiatives, including:

• Enhance product offerings, including strategic partnerships with leading players in the data and analytics ecosystem (several of which are already major customers as well as partners);
• Continued investment in scaling up the Unsupervised team, including in sales, marketing, product development and engineering, customer success and people operations;
• Delivering innovation of the Unsupervised platform to drive even greater AI sophistication and data exploration while making the platform even easier to use for business leaders.

Unsupervised has raised more than $55 million to date in funding.

“Despite an explosion of data supply, a shortage of data scientists to analyze that data prevents companies today from realizing significant business value,” said Jonathan Lim, Principal at SignalFire. “Unsupervised solves this crisis by using AI to automate that analytics, enabling non-technical business users to directly identify and respond to opportunities to optimize top-line growth, customer acquisition, and ultimately profitability. SignalFire is excited to leverage our own AI expertise to help Unsupervised build the enduring automated analytics franchise."