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DFJ leads $80M round into AI-driven business intelligence startup Aera
Business intelligence startup Aera Technology Inc. today announced that it has raised $80 million in new funding to flesh out its vision for analytics.
The Series C round was led by DFJ Growth, one of the main funds of storied venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson. NewView Capital, Georgian Partners and members of Aera’s executive team chipped in as well.
Mountain View, California-based Aera launched more than a decade ago as FusionOps. In early 2017, the company rebranded and debuted a cloud-based business intelligence platform focused on helping corporate executives make better decisions. It provides suggestions on how operations can be improved by analyzing the data in an organization’s business systems.
Aera was built with large enterprises in mind: Its data crawlers can pull billions of records from a company’s applications and external sources such as partner firms’ systems. The platform then harmonizes the information, combining the individual records into a cohesive whole with a consistent format that’s easier to process.
The analysis itself is carried out by machine learning algorithms. Users can dig into the information with what Aera calls Self-Driving Skills, specialized analytics tools that each focus on a different business task and visualize results in sleek graphs.
One such tool, Cognitive Demand Management, can forecast a company’s revenue months in advance. It does so by looking at the data in the sales group’s customer relationship management system and factoring in relevant future developments such as upcoming product launches. Another tool, Predictive Sourcing, anticipates potential disrupts to a company’s supply chain.
Some of Aera’s Self-Driving Skills take it a step further by recommending actions to improve business results. One of them is a supply chain optimization tool that, among other things, provides advice on how an organization should fine-tune product pricing to increase margins.
Aera will use the new $80 million round to bolster its lineup of Self-driving Skills and the underlying platform, as well as expand internationally in pursuit of new users. The startup already counts several Fortune 500 companies as customers. One client, consumer goods giant Unilever Plc, uses Aera to identify areas for improvement in its supply chain.
Aera has raised a total of $170 million in funding to date.
Image: Aera
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