London-based Gyana raises $3.9M for a no-code method to knowledge science – theinformationsuperhighway

Coding and other IT skills are still among the most important skills a person can have in today's work environment. In recent years, however, a new generation of tools that offer an alternative type of harvest has also increased. The fruits of technology: "No-code" software, with which everyone – technically or not technically – apps, games, AI-based Can create chatbots and other products that used to be the exclusive domain of engineers and computer scientists.

Today, one of the newer startups in this category – London-based Gyana, which allows non-technical people to perform data science analysis on any structured data set – is announcing a £ 3m round to advance the next phase of growth.

Under the leadership of the British company Fuel Ventures, Biz Stone from Twitter, Green Shores Capital and U + I are other investors in this round. Since its inception in 2015, the startup has raised a total of $ 6.8 million.

Gyana (Sanskrit for "knowledge") was co-founded by Joyeeta Das and David Kell, both of whom were aiming for postgraduate degrees in Oxford: Das, a former engineer, earned an MBA and Kell received a PhD in physics.

That said the idea to develop this tool came from the fact that the couple saw a great separation not only in their studies but also around the world – less a digital divide than a digital light year in terms the distance between groups of people who don't know how to work in the field of data science.

"Everyone is talking about using data to make decisions, and the world is data-driven, but in fact this offering is available to less than one percent of the world," she said.

For this reason, the couple decided to build a platform that describes this as a way to empower "Citizen Data Scientists" by allowing users to upload structured records (such as a CSV file) and run a series of queries on them to visualize trends and other insights more easily.

While the longer-term goal may be to enable everyone to gain analytical insight from a long list of numbers, the more practical and immediate use has been in corporate services and in creating tools for non-technical knowledge workers to improve them. data-driven decisions.

To prove its software, the startup first developed an app that is based on the Neera platform (Sanskrit for "water") and specifically analyzes the measurement data for pedestrians and other "human movements" that are used in retail, real estate and applications Planning is useful in the public domain – for example too Determine whether certain retail locations are performing well, whether you are gaining a foothold in popular locations, where to place or remove stores, or how to value a property,

Starting from the goal of small and medium-sized businesses – those who most likely don't have an internal data scientist to meet their business needs – the startup has already gained a number of customers who are actually much larger. they include Vodafone, Barclays, EY, Pret a Manger, Knight Frank and the UK Department of Defense. Contracts with these companies are currently expected to be worth around £ 1m.

This, in turn, served as a trigger for getting this final round of funding and launching Vayu (Sanskrit for "air") – a more general app that covers a wider set of parameters that can be applied to a dataset. So far, it has been adopted by academic researchers, financial services providers, and others who use analytics in their work, Das said.

For both Vayu and Neera, the goal – refreshing – is to make the entire experience as privacy-friendly as possible, according to Das. Currently you download an app if you want to use Gyana and you keep your data locally while you work on it. Gyana has no “anonymization” and no data retention in its processes, except for analyzes with the cursor on it, so that Gyana knows how it can improve its product.

"There are always ways to reverse engineer these things," Das said of anonymization. "We just wanted to make sure we didn't accidentally create a situation where, despite learning from anonymous materials, you can't reverse engineer what people are analyzing." We are simply not convinced. "

While it is commendable to build and ship a tool with a lot of potential, Gyana risks facing the problem that I see as "water, water everywhere". Sometimes when a person really has no experience or goal, it can be difficult to think about how to start when there is something you can do. That said they identified this too, so Gyana is already offering some tutorials and tools in the app to help drive the user forward. However, it is planned to eventually bring in a variety of records that users can start with, and also to develop a more intuitive method of “reading” the basics of the files to find out what types of data queries a person is most likely to want to perform.

The rise of "no-code" software was fast in the technology world and included the spread of startups, large acquisitions and large rounds of financing. Companies like Airtable and DashDash aim to create analytics based on interfaces that follow the basic design of a table. AppSheet, a platform for creating mobile apps without code, was recently acquired by Google. and Roblox (for building code-free games) and Uncorq (for app development) both raised significant funds this week.

Gartner predicts that around 65% of total app development will be on low or no code platforms by 2024, and Forrester estimates that the no and low code market will be worth around $ 10 billion this year – will have dollars and will grow to $ 21.2 billion by 2024.

This is a great business opportunity for companies like Gyana who have used the no-code approach specifically for data science.

In the spirit of Citizen Data Scientists, however, it is intended to use a consumer version of the apps free of charge to register corporate users with better-paid products, the price of which is calculated on an annual license basis (currently customers), depending on usage, between US $ 6,000 and US $ 12,000 -Dollars, she said.

"We want to work for free as long as possible," said Das in terms of both the data tools and the records it will offer to users. “The greatest added value is not to access premium data that is difficult to access. We are not a data market, but we want to provide data that makes sense to access. "Even with business users, we want you to do 90% of your work without paying for anything."