Data science startup Obviously AI raises funding from Arka Venture Labs

Berkeley, California headquartered data science startup Obviously AI has raised an undisclosed amount in a fresh round of funding led by venture capital firm Arka Venture Labs.

Founded in 2018 by Tapojit Debnath and Nirman Dave, Obviously AI leverages predictive tools to enable non-technical business analysts use data science. According to the founders, the platform helps small and medium businesses as well as small departments of larger companies in the insurance, marketing, banking and gaming sectors. 

In January, the company raised an undisclosed amount in a pre-seed funding round from Berkeley SkyDeck, a joint venture accelerator formed by UC Berkeley College of Engineering, Haas School of Business and the office of vice chancellor for research at SkyDeck, according to data on Crunchbase. The accelerator invests $100,000 in chosen startups.  

Venture capital firm Sequoia Capital, computer graphics company Nvidia and some angels are among its investors, as per information on its website.

The company claims to have provided 1,000 predictions in less than a minute to over 1,000 users so far. 

“We realised that business users often cared about getting decision-making insights about their customers, products and their usage. But they often had to wait for weeks on a data engineer to get a single question answered,” co-founder and CEO Dave said.

“It is amazing what marketers, salespeople and other non-technical business users can learn when they use our platform,” co-founder and CTO Debnath said.

San Francisco headquartered Arka Venture Labs, which has an office in Bengaluru, is a cross-border accelerator fund formed by venture capital firms Blume Ventures, BGV and Emergent Ventures. It invests capital in the seed stage, offers mentoring and provides startups access to the Silicon Valley ecosystem. 

Arka Venture Labs focuses on business-to-business (B2B) startups. Its portfolio includes customer data platform FirstHive, artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled next-generation recommendation engine dotin, data science platform Jovian.ml, sales support startup RevvSales and cloud-based ecommerce inventory management firm Primaseller.