Bengaluru: Tata Sons chairman emeritus Ratan Tata invested an unspecified amount in the US-based Infinite Analytics, a predictive data analytics firm from MIT, with sales operations in India, the company said on Monday.
"We have received funding from Tata to expand our predictive analytics technology to verticals beyond retail and e-commerce," the three-year-old analytics firm said in a statement from Boston.
Existing investors like Nikhil Vora of Sixth Sense Ventures and new investors from Silicon Valley in the US and India participated in the firm's third round of funding.
"It's a dream come true to have Tata back us. We have grown up admiring and respecting his business acumen. This is a great opportunity for us to learn from him. His guidance and vision will help us grow into an analytics powerhouse," said Infinite's co-founder and chief executive Akash Bhatia.
Born in a Massachusetts Institute of Technology class of Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of World Wide Web platform, the start-up firm raised an unspecified amount of seed round from investors the world over spanning Australia, Britain, India, Taiwan and the US.
Berners-Lee and Twitter's chief media scientist Deb Roy are advisors and also investors in the company.
"We will use the additional investment toAbeef up hiring, scale up in current verticals and to explore newer verticals," Vora added.
Infinite's marquee customers include AirBnB, Comcast, B2W Digital, BabyOye, Croma Retail, eBay, Future Group, Infibeam, NBA, NDTV Retail, Trendin and Tata Marketplace.
"We are honoured to have Tata as an investor and advisor. We share a common vision about how technology can be used to solve difficult problems in industry and society," said Infinite's co-founder and chief technology officer Purushotham Botla.
Specialising in deep machine learning and predictive analytics, the company's analytics platform merges data from multiple sources spawning customer demographic data, transactions data, loyalty program data, third party data and open data to create a 360-degree view of the user.
"Our NLP (natural language processing), semantic and predictive analytics algorithms detect and predict patterns in the merged data with a view to increasing revenues for clients," the statement added.
