Alkymi, an early-stage startup looking to provide information to highly manual business processes such as copying and pasting financial data from emails and attachments, launched today with a $ 5 million seed capital investment.
Kanaan partner led the round with the participation of the former investor Work-Bench. SimpCorp also contributed as a strategic investor. As part of the investment agreement, Joydeep Bhattacharyya from Canaan becomes a member of Alkymi Blackboard.
According to Harald Collet, founder and CEO of the company, the startup brings machine learning to the business analyst's inbox with the goal of automating many of the tedious manual parts of the job. The company has developed a solution that automatically extracts data that these analysts previously had to copy and paste into applications, spreadsheets, or databases.
"We focus on automating tasks in emails and documents and helping business analysts automate the tasks where they have adopted and selected business, customer and financial data that is fed into business processes." Collet said theinformationsuperhighway.
For today, these are all financial services, an industry Collet has been in for two decades that could benefit greatly from this approach. He uses an investment asset manager as an example. This person received emails with investment data, copied the data and pasted it into an application or database. She repeated this many times to report the total investment performance. Alkymi automatically extracts some of this data, reducing the need for manual copying and pasting.
GIF: Alkymi
It takes some time to train the underlying machine model, from hours to days, depending on the size and complexity of the process. Once that's done, Collet says that the software can deal with what it knows and leave aside what it can't find out about a human being intervening and then learning from it in a typical machine learning loop. Over time, business analysts should be able to do more analysis instead of spending time entering data to get to the analysis part. Rates of 40-50% automation or more are being studied for less complex data sets.
While the company today focuses on financial services, the long-term plan is to expand into other industries over time. It is currently growing rapidly with paying financial services customers. It has also partnered with investor SimpCorp, who will offer the service on its platform for financial service providers.
The company was founded in 2017 and Collet talked to potential customers before building the product. It offers an on-prem and cloud version as well as workflow invoices. The company now has 7 employees in New York City and plans to double that number this year.
