Madison-based startup looks to accelerate market launch of its Conversational Intelligence platform
DataChat, Inc, a University of Wisconsin-Madison spinout with a sophisticated yet intuitive data analytics platform, today announced the closing of a $4 million seed funding round led by leading Silicon Valley venture capital firms WRVI Capital and Nepenthe Capital. Other participants included individual investors from Google and Palo Alto Networks.
“We’re building technology that represents the future of how people get insights from their data. It’s a sophisticated technology that cuts across multiple disciplines in computer science, including data science and AI,” said Jignesh Patel, the CEO and co-founder of DataChat, “We needed smart money to fuel our vision and this round does exactly that.”
Growing customer interest led the company’s leadership to pursue investment from major venture capital firms in Silicon Valley. DataChat plans to use this funding to further scale the team and customer base.
“DataChat has gathered a very talented team of serial entrepreneurs from University of Wisconsin-Madison. Jignesh Patel is creating a Conversational Intelligence platform to provide deep insights into data. WRVI Capital is pleased to lead with $4 million in seed funding to commercialize this intuitive data analytics platform for multiple vertical enterprise markets,” said Lip-Bu Tan, Founding Managing Partner of WRVI Capital and Chairman of Walden International.
DataChat’s Conversational Intelligence (CI) platform helps business users obtain valuable insights from their data by simply chatting with the platform; no coding experience required. The company describes its mission as “AI + BI = CI”, which summarizes their approach to transform traditional business intelligence (BI) by using artificial intelligence (AI) to usher in the new paradigm of CI. With CI, business users can discover insights into their data themselves. This democratization of big data allows enterprises to improve their competitive edge and build their analytics muscle quickly, easily, economically, and collaboratively.
“Data analytics has been stuck in decades-old technologies that are people- and process-heavy,” said Stanford Professor Christopher Ré, a world-renowned leader in artificial intelligence, MacArthur Foundation award winner, and advisor to DataChat, “With DataChat’s novel Conversational Intelligence technology, AI and data come together, empowering anyone and everyone to self-serve deep data analytics, transforming how enterprises realize value from their data.”
DataChat has previously been funded in part by America’s Seed Fund, a program of the National Science Foundation. The company is also supported by the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF), UW-Madison’s nonprofit patent and licensing organization.
