ODAIA Intelligence secures $1.6M seed financing led by Panache and StandUp

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By Ted Liu

ODAIA has closed a $1.6 million seed round of financing co-led by Panache Ventures and StandUp Ventures with participation from BDC Capital’s Women in Technology Venture Fund, Inovia Capital and MaRS IAF.

The new investors join pre-seed investors including Toronto Innovation Acceleration Partners, University of Toronto’s UTEST, N49P, Ontario Centres of Excellence (OCE), and Amar Varma, co-founder of Autonomic.ai (acquired by Ford).

ODAIA intends to use new funding to make key technical hires, support early customers and prepare for the public launch of ODAIA’s AI SaaS platform.

Founded by Periklis Andritsos, Helen Kontozopoulos, Gael Bernard, and Philip Poulidis, ODAIA of Toronto and Lausanne, Switzerland, is an enterprise AI Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) provider.

photo credit: ODAIA

News Release

ODAIA Raises $1.6 Million in Seed Funding Co-led by Panache and StandUp

Toronto-Based AI SaaS Startup Raises $1.6 Million from Canadian VCs to Empower Enterprise Companies to Predict Customer Journeys and Next Best Actions Using Artificial Intelligence

Toronto, Ontario, September 23, 2019 –

ODAIA, an enterprise AI Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) startup, today announced that it has closed a seed round of $1.6 million co-led by Panache Ventures and StandUp Ventures with participation from BDC Capital’s Women in Technology Venture Fund, Inovia Capital and MaRS IAF. This new group of investors joins pre-seed investors including Toronto Innovation Acceleration Partners, University of Toronto’s UTEST, N49P, Ontario Centres of Excellence (OCE), and Amar Varma, co-founder of Autonomic.ai (acquired by Ford). This round of funding will be used to make key technical hires, support early customers and prepare for the public launch of ODAIA’s AI SaaS platform.

“Successful customer journey analytics require the ability to combine data from multiple sources and apply novel algorithms in Machine Learning and AI to deliver predictive insights and attribution,’’ says Philip Poulidis, co-founder and CEO of ODAIA. “We are thrilled to have such a great group of investors joining us on this journey and believing in our team and vision”.

According to Gartner, the customer journey analytics market is expected to grow from USD $4.76 Billion in 2017 to USD $12.22 Billion by 2022. While analytics insights are often derived from enterprise data using visualization tools, the data tends to be scattered across numerous information technology systems and the tools lack sophisticated methods for applying machine learning and artificial intelligence. Enterprises need a system that can offer a complete picture of a customer’s behavior, draw correlations between data sets, and capture multi-channel actions and contextual data, as well as offer accurate predictive models.

Leveraging years of research and development in the creation of novel methods of applying process mining techniques, machine learning and prediction algorithms to customer journey mapping, ODAIA is uniquely positioned to offer a scalable, data-driven SaaS tool for companies to curate and explore their data in a way that provides interesting and unique benefits. ODAIA works with marketing, sales and data science teams at leading enterprise companies to create a feedback loop from insights to action at both strategic and tactical levels.

“Productizing AI as a SaaS platform is a challenging endeavor that very few companies have been able to deliver,” said Prashant Matta, Partner at Panache Ventures. “After meeting countless startups, ODAIA was the first we met where we felt confident in the team’s ability to pull it off.”

“ODAIA is adding a new dimension to customer journey analytics with a new tool that enables employees to work directly with customer journey data to help deliver better customer experiences,” adds Michelle McBane, Managing Director at StandUp Ventures. “We saw a great opportunity to invest in a diverse team that we believe will grow to be leaders in their industry.”

ODAIA was incorporated in March 2018 and spun out of the University of Toronto in October 2018 by Professor Periklis Andritsos and Adjunct Professor Helen Kontozopoulos from the University of Toronto, Gael Bernard, a PhD student from the University of Lausanne, and serial entrepreneur Philip Poulidis.

CONTACTS
Helen Kontozopoulos
info@odaia.ai