Singapore’s Nugit raises US$5.2M from Sequoia to bring AI to digital marketing
The company wants its product to be indistinguishable from the work of humans
A Singaporean artificial intelligence (AI) company that provides analytics for digital marketers and C-suite professionals, Nugit has announced today a US$5.2 million funding from Sequoia India.
The money will be used to improve the Nugit platform and increase investment in AI and natural language selection.
“We expect to double the size of the team in the next 6-12 months with more data scientists and engineering talent,” said Dave Sanderson, CEO at Nugit, in an email to e27. “And we will definitely continue to work with more clients to help them automate their marketing analytics.”
The company is tapping into a digital marketing industry predicted to be worth US$185.4 billion in 2017 — but one in which the average analyst spends a majority of his or her time extracting and filtering data.
“Right now, the low hanging fruit is using AI for data cleaning, processing and mapping. Successfully doing this instantly frees up 50 to 80 per cent of analysts’ time to focus on higher value analysis,” said Sanderson.
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He also pointed out advantages he saw in speed, accuracy and scalability.
“AI is unbiased and great for transparency. They process data independently and can be more accurate in understanding what people really need, usually even better than people themselves,” Sanderson said.
Sanderson said the goal for the company is to make Nugit the benchmark for AI data analytics in this field, and that the product becomes indistinguishable from the work of humans. His goal for the company is to build an open source API that can be easily integrated into its clients’ data sources.
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As for Sequoia, the investment firm was attracted to Nugit’s data scientists and engineers, as well as its impressive client list that already includes Facebook, Johnson & Johnson, Digi and Starcom, among others.
“It has been impressive to see the intelligence of the Nugit platform, and how it offers enhanced efficiency and clarity to marketers,”said Pieter Kemps, Investment Advisor at Sequoia, in a statement. “Nugit is part of a trend where global SaaS businesses are being built from Asia.”
Founded in 2013, Nugit is headquartered in Singapore. Its client base spans 146,000 accounts across 500 brands in 36 countries.
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