Infosys' Gopalakrishnan invests in Ratan Tata-backed Crayon Data

Infosys co-founder Senapathy Gopalakrishnan has invested an undisclosed amount in Singapore and Chennai-based big data company Crayon Data.

The investment, which is a part of Crayon's Series A2 round of funding, will be used to enhance Maya, its flagship product, and expand the firm's global footprint.

Founded by Srikant Sastri and Suresh Shankar in 2012, one of Asia’s leading big data companies, Crayon had received $10 million in a Series A round led by Jungle Ventures and Spring Seeds in 2013. The investment was followed by two undisclosed funding from Tata Sons chairman emeritus Ratan Tata and Japanese diversified conglomerate Mitsui & Co in 2015 and 2016 respectively.

“Your traditional enterprise-bank, airlines-you have shopped with over the years, given them money, but, they still send irrelevant messages and offers all the time. What Crayon's Maya does is -- change the equation. We help them create 'taste' fingerprints,“ said Suresh, co-founder of Crayon Data, reported ET.

The startup works with banks and card issuers in Apac, Middle East, and the US. It has patents like the TasteGraph, a unique map of the world's tastes, with billions of data points on consumer lifestyles, and ChoiceAI, an algorithm that mixes internal enterprise behaviour data with external internet taste and social influence data sets.

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“I see that the future of business will be the ability to leverage AI and big data to create 'personal' digital experiences for millions of customers. Crayon has a unique ability to bridge multiple worlds: analytics to digital, offline to online, internal, and external data. This makes them as critical to credit cards, travel and hospitality, and retail enterprises,“ said Gopalakrishnan.

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According to an industry report by NASSCOM – in partnership with BlueOcean Market Intelligence, the analytics market in India could reach to $2.3 billion by the end of 2017-18.

Besides Crayon Data, Heckyl, Flutura, Indix, Germin8, Frrole, and PromptCloud are some other big data startups active in this space.

Crayon Data: Website