Ratan Tata backs Infinite Analytics, a predictive analytics company built from MIT

Infinite Analytics, a company out of MIT has announced a fund raise from Ratan Tata to expand its predictive analytics technology to verticals beyond retail and e-commerce. Existing investors like Nikhil Vora of Sixth Sense Ventures and new investors from Silicon Valley and India have also participated in this round. Personalities like Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web and Deb Roy, Chief Media Scientist at Twitter, are advisors in the company.Founded by Akash Bhatia and Purushotam Botla, the company was born in an MIT class of Sir Tim Berners-Lee. Since its inception in 2012, Infinite Analytics has managed to onboard customers like AirBnB, Comcast, B2W Digital, BabyOye, Croma Retail, eBay, Future Group, Infibeam, NBA, NDTV Retail, Trendin, Tata Marketplace, etc. This funding round will also be used to beef up hiring, scale up in current verticals and to explore newer verticals.

Akash graduated from MIT Sloan in June 2012 prior to which, he co-founded Kyazoonga, a ticketing company from India. Before Kyazoonga, Akash was an engineer with Oracle/PeopleSoft in Silicon Valley. As for Purushotam, he completed his Masters in Engineering and Management from MIT in June 2013. Prior to this, he worked with Fidelity Investments building electronic trading products and high volume market data processing applications. While at MIT, the two of them decided to come together and start up Infinite analytics.

As a company, Infinite Analytics specializes in Deep Machine Learning and Predictive Analytics. Their Analytics Platform merges data from multiple sources (customer demographic data, transactions data, loyalty program data, third party data, open data) to create a 360-degree view of the user. Their NLP, Semantic and Predictive Analytics Algorithms detect and predict patterns in the merged data with the end goal of increasing revenues for clients.

According to Akash Bhatia, Co-founder & CEO, Infinite Analytics, “It’s a dream come true to have Mr. Tata back us. We have grown up admiring and respecting Mr.Tata’s business acumen and this is a great opportunity for us to learn from him directly. His guidance and vision will definitely help us grow Infinite Analytics into an analytics powerhouse.”

Ratan Tata has been very actively investing in startups and has funded more than 10 startups (see list). Previously, Tata has also invested in another MIT startup Altaeros Energy. It a wind energy company formed out of MIT, Boston and had raised funding from RNT Associates. Big Data and Analytics as a space has become relevant owing to more and more businesses moving towards using data to make decisions. Mu Sigma is one of the biggest success stories from India. Startups like Heckyl, Indix and many more have come to notice and all these B2B businesses are making steady progress away from the media spotlight.

Website: Infinite Analytics

Disclaimer: Ratan Tata is an investor in YourStory.com