U.K.-based Data Science-as-a-Service provider Big Data for Humans Ltd. has come out of stealth backed by a $1.2 million seed funding round led by EC1 Capital Ltd., with additional investment from Firestartr LLP, the Scottish Investment Bank and four Angel investors.

Big Data for Humans was founded by graduates from the tech incubator Techstars London, and received its first investment in 2014. Their platform has already gained good traction in the U.K., scooping up a number of clients in the retail and travel sectors. The company says its data-science-as-a-service platform is designed to help clients in these sectors delve into their Big Data to understand exactly who their customers are and what they want, and further helps come up with ways to sell more products and services to them.

Peter Ellen, CEO at Big Data For Humans, told TechCrunch that companies in the retail and travel business often lack scalable ways to manage their customer marketing efforts, because data science teams are incredibly expensive and are unable to scale across markets.

“As a result they fail to monetize the customers, often wearing them out with expensive and pointless promotional messaging,” Ellen said. “But 80 per cent of revenue comes from 20 per cent of customers, so the problem needs to be fixed”.

And that’s exactly what Big Data for Humans does, by automating insights over billions of calculations, before generating action plans that scale across multiple channels. The biggest draw of course is that customers don’t need to pay for in-house infrastructure and data scientist.

“Big Data For Humans is at the forefront of changing the big data landscape, by enabling businesses to automatically derive insights from their transactional data and help drive better marketing decisions,” said Yannick Roux, principal at EC1 Capital.

Big Data For Humans runs out of offices in London and Glasgow, Scotland, and makes money by charging a subscription fee for its service.

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