UPDATED 09:00 EDT / AUGUST 31 2021

AI

Decision intelligence startup PeakAI raises $75M

Investors have decided to back the “Decision Intelligence” startup Peak AI Ltd. with a new $75 million round of funding.

Announced this morning, the Series C round was led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2 and saw participation from all of the company’s existing investors too, including MMC Ventures, Oxx, Praetura Ventures, Arete and Octopus Ventures. The company has now raised a total of $119 million, it said today.

Peak, a U.K. startup, has developed an artificial intelligence-based decision-making platform that helps companies make more informed decisions with the aim of boosting operational efficiency, growing their revenue and profits.

The platform plugs into an organization’s systems and then ingests any and all data that users care to feed into it. It can then be used to help find answers to a range of questions people might have. For example, a manufacturer could ask it how much of a certain product it should produce, or where to ship that product, based on the sales data it provides.

Alternatively, Peak can help to answer questions around how to manage stock better, or when to ramp up or decrease headcount at a warehouse. The platform can also help out in areas such as marketing and advertising, giving advice on how to target campaigns at the right audiences.

Peak has a fairly limited focus for what appears to be such a general-purpose AI platform. The company said it primarily works with retailers, consumer goods companies and manufacturing organizations – companies that have physical products, in other words.

Nonetheless, that narrow focus appears to have paid off for Peak, as it claims strong demand for its Decision Intelligence platform, with its revenue doubling in the past 12 months off an undisclosed base. Some of its biggest customers including Nike Inc., PepsiCo., KFC, the U.K. retailer Prettylittlething.com Ltd., Superdry Plc. and CJ Group.

Peak co-founder and Chief Executive Richard Potter said the company was growing fast because it’s becoming almost impossible to run a modern brand these days without AI to help in the decision-making process.

“We uniquely simplify the task of data scientists and engineers, who use Peak to rapidly create and deploy AI applications to business users,” he said. “These applications empower day-to-day decision makers across businesses to achieve transformational gains.”

SoftBank Investment Advisers Senior Investor Max Ohrstrand said he shares a vision with Peak: He sees future enterprises running on a kind of centralized AI platform that will be used to optimize their entire value chain. “To realize this, a new breed of platform is needed and we’re hugely impressed with what Richard and the excellent team have built at Peak,” he said.

Peak said today’s funding will be used to fuel its ambitious expansion plans. The company will open new offices in the U.S. and India and add about 200 new employees over the next year, in addition to boosting investment in its research and development efforts.

Photo: qimono/Pixabay

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