Machine learning platform Mate Labs raises seed funding

Bengaluru-based machine learning platform Mate Labs has raised seed funding of $550,000 (Rs 4 crore) led by Omphalos Ventures India LLP. Other investors include Eagle10 Ventures, a group of entrepreneurs and industry veterans; co-working group 91Springboard; and Deepak Sharma, former chairman of Citi Bank. 

Kristy’s Kitchen co-founder Sumit Sinha; Khattar Holding Pte. Ltd; and Docuvity co-founder Tejan Timblo also participated in the seed funding.

Mate Labs was helped by Zeroth, a Hong Kong-based artificial intelligence and machine learning accelerator.

Owned and operated by Matelabs Innovations Private Limited, the company has created a fully automated machine learning platform called Mateverse designed for data scientists as well as analysts to build tailored machine learning and deep learning models without needing to write code.

The startup was founded by fellow graduates from National Institute of Technology, Bhopal: Rahul Vishwakarma and Kailash Ahirwar.

“We observed that large enterprises around the world were building platforms for developers, and no one considered building something for the non-developers. So, after tinkering with several ideas since college, Kailash and I, finally landed on this vertical for Mate Labs, knowing how fundamental it is for the inexperienced lot of business people in India and all over the world, who wanted to implement machine learning into their analytics, but had scarce resources available to them,” Vishwakarma said.

The start-up is currently developing its small, medium and big enterprise pipelines belonging to banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI) and retail sectors.

“Machine learning models for businesses are currently limited to those who can afford a team of data scientists. Mate Labs is changing this model. All business decision-makers can leverage their platform, to build, train and deploy their models in simple steps. It suddenly opens up a huge market and Mate Labs is taking right strides to capture the major part of it,” said Pramod D'Souza of Eagle10 Ventures.

Omphalos Ventures India

Omphalos Ventures India is an early-stage venture capital firm set up in June last year. It invests in startups valued at $1-3 million, with a ticket size that can go up to $300,000.

The company plans to invest in around 30 startups by 2020.

Omphalos Ventures has backed 10 startups so far operating in sectors like healthcare, e-commerce, artificial intelligence, machine learning and analytics, transport and logistics, and power and energy.

Its most recent investment was in reverse auction-based e-commerce platform Arzooo.