Arka Venture Labs leads funding round in data science startup Jovian

California- and Bengaluru-based data science startup Jovian has raised $450,000 from investors led by Arka Venture Labs, media reports said.

Better Capital, SenseAI, Axilor Ventures and a few individual angel investors from Silicon Valley also participated in the round, according to reports in digital publications YourStory and TheIndianWire.com.

The startup plans to use the funds to develop its product and grow its engineering team.

The reports said the company is looking for community development via webinars, online courses and hackathons, and customer development in India and Silicon Valley.

Queries sent to Jovian and Arka Venture Labs did not elicit response till the time of publishing this report.

Owned and operated by SwiftAce Inc., Jovian was founded in 2017 by Aakash NS and Siddhant Ujjain.

The startup, which is a platform for data scientists to track and reproduce machine learning experiments, was a part of the Axilor Accelerator programme in 2018.

Jovian is building collaboration tools to power the future of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). According to the startup, the tools will be able to track machine learning datasets, models, hyper-parameters and results with a simple yet powerful dashboard.

Ujjain, CTO of Jovian, was cited as saying in the media reports that the founding duo realised that there was a huge gap in the availability of the quality of tools to the data science team for managing their work, as they were data scientists themselves and wanted to solve this problem.

Aakash was cited as saying that their aim was to make Jovian easy for first-timers and to provide advanced features that large enterprises might require to manage their companies’ data science work.