AVORA, a London-based company that delivers next-generation Business Intelligence (BI) and machine learning as a service, announces that it has raised €1.7 million in funding from institutional and angel investors. New investor Crane Venture Partners joins angel investors Peter Simon, founder of retailer Monsoon, and Steve Garnett, former chairman of Salesforce EMEA.
According to analyst firm Gartner, through 2017, a full 60% of big data projects will fail to go beyond piloting and experimentation, and will be abandoned. AVORA was founded by serial entrepreneur Ricky Thomas, who previously established and sold two online companies – DatingUK and PetMeds. After experiencing the data challenges when running businesses firsthand, Thomas developed AVORA, offering a Software as a Service solution that redefines how companies get value from their data.
AVORA founder and CEO Ricky Thomas commented: “The first wave of business intelligence software left many companies with multi-million-pound investments that do not provide a holistic view of company data. Traditional BI just generates charts, doesn’t tell where you look or help you do your job, there’s nothing intelligent about them. With AVORA we have created a software service to connect disparate data sources without the massive infrastructure investment and coding knowledge.”
AVORA, which was founded in 2014, consolidates data from hundreds of sources within an organisation, allowing access to users to analyse and act on the information that’s important to them. Utilising machine learning, AVORA automatically detects anomalies and trends, alerting users to key changes in business metrics. AVORA has secured clients in retailing, media, and advertising who use their technology to keep track of customer churn, review advertising spend, and monitor performance on current in-market campaigns, along with other applications.
Thomas continued: “Using machine learning technology, AVORA provides business users with a smart system to monitor your business and suggest improvements that drive business outcomes, in real time. AVORA gives business leaders the benefits of having an experienced department of data scientists providing ongoing business insights that improve business performance without the major time and cost investments.”
Scott Sage, partner at Crane Venture Partners, stated: “Using AVORA gives businesses the advantages of a team of data scientists and business analysts without the upfront investment of typical business intelligence systems and data science teams. We’re impressed with what the company has already built and see great potential for AVORA to bring its next-generation Business Intelligence to businesses around the world.”
After finding initial traction with large ecommerce companies, AVORA is seeing demand from other industries looking to manage real-time data and turn it into actionable business insights. Recently, companies such as ad agencies AKA, Adtrak, and Karmarama have adopted AVORA to drive business performance for their advertising clients. The new funding will enable AVORA to expand into the US and hire more senior business leaders in enterprise technology, including recent hires from Salesforce.com, Splunk, and more.