Sydney startup Hyper Anna raises $1.25 million from Reinventure and AirTree Ventures

Sydney startup Hyper Anna has today announced it has raised $1.25 million in funding from Westpac’s VC arm, Reinventure and AirTree Ventures. The investment will help the startup launch its product in the US next year.

Still in beta, Hyper Anna has created a data analytics solution to give every business access to valuable insights, without the need of a data scientist. Every interaction a customer has with a platform or service generates data, however this data can be hard to measure and analyse, particularly for small businesses.

The Sydney startup has developed a way for small and large businesses alike to measure their data, no matter what source it comes from and how it is collected. Users can link up their Google Analytics to Hyper Anna and can even track in-store customer behaviour and transactions.

By leveraging machine learning technology, Hyper Anna can constantly tune itself to provide valuable knowledge and predictive capabilities. Scheduled for general release in early 2017, Hyper Anna allows users to asks natural language questions of the data collection using voice, text or email. The tool can be used to review existing data collections and to provide predictive insights, and leverages machine learning to ensure that results improve with use.

The startup was founded by data scientists Natalie Nguyen, Sam Zheng, and Kent Tian, who wanted to make the interaction with data collection easier, cheaper, and more insightful.

“Our vision is for people to be able to interact with big data by just asking questions in plain English about key drivers of the business like ‘how’s my sales doing’ and the machine intelligence agent just goes away, analyses sales pattern and brings back important insights for you,” Nguyen explained.

There are three ways users can interact with Anna: they can either go into a website and pipe the analytics data directly to Hyper Anna and ask questions online, ask a question, cc Anna in an email conversation, or interact through the platform via text.

For example, a user can email their colleague to let them know about a sales performance meeting at 2pm and cc Anna in on that conversation. Anna can read from the email context and understand that the user will need information about the company’s sales performance and then email that information through.

John Henderson from Airtree believes businesses are yearning for easy to use data analytics and visualisation tools.

“Anna is delivering them already, and will only get smarter over time,” he said.

Nguyen said that the investment from Reinventure and AirTree Ventures was important to support the growth ambitions of the company, but also signalled more widely the potential of the technology.

Hyper Anna is currently working with IAG, trialling its beta version on top of the insurance company’s data sources. Westpac, which awarded Hyper Anna $1 million in seed funding earlier this year, is also using Hyper Anna.

Image: Sam Zheng, Kent Tian and Natalie Nguyen. Source: Supplied.