Introduction:
The predictive analysis startup, Pecan.ai, announces $35 million in a Series B round. GGV Capital led this round. Co-founder and CEO Zohar Bronfman says the funds will enable the expansion of the operations globally. It will also help organizations adopt Artificial Intelligence and big data. Data Analytics is a concept that analyzes raw data to derive meaningful insights. Market research future anticipates the Global Data Analytics market will be valued at over $132 billion by 2026.
A range of organizations can use data to shoot up their marketing strategies. This will also increase the bottom line, personalize the content, and better understand their customers. Businesses that use big data increase their profits by an average of 8%. A survey conducted by BARC research reports the value.
More about Pecan.ai:
Pecan.ai has offices in New York and Tel Aviv. The startup offers a no-code platform for data automation, encoding, restructuring, cleansing, and engineering. This way AI-based predictive algorithms are created from various deep neural networks. After recursive competitions within multiple networks, the platform leaves only one fully trained neural network. This network comes evolved and refined for accuracy.
Statement from Pecan’s spokesperson:
“After fine-tuning the product and our flagship use cases, Pecan came out of stealth in February of last year,” a spokesperson said via email. “The pandemic affected us in a positive way. The need to predict erratic patterns of behavior, as well as the increase in digital consumption, boosted the demand for Pecan’s brand of fast and easy-to-use AI.”
The concept behind Evolutionary Computation:
This approach is called evolutionary computation. It is a group of algorithms for global optimization which is inspired by biological evolution. Instead of following explicit mathematical gradients these models generate variants, test them, and retain the top performers. Pecan supports data in a wide variety of formats. It offers dashboards to provide visibility of factors that affect outcomes. The platform continuously monitors and optimizes models while enriching them using external data. Pecan also can output the predictions to third-party software.
How the concept supports businesses:
The concept allows analysts and business stakeholders to obtain decision-making insights. Pekan supports use cases that include demand forecasting, conversion, and lifetime value. The list also includes VIP customers, upselling, cross-selling, and sales analytics.
“In order to appeal to data analysts, Pecan is both ends to end and use case-focused, which greatly reduces the complexity and statistical knowledge required from its users,” the spokesperson said. “Unlike some of its competitors, Pecan handles everything from data prep to monitoring data in production with a drag-and-drop UI. The data prep and feature selection/engineering components are critical. Getting data into proper form for AI models can take weeks or months of effort on the part of data scientists and engineers, but with some help from the Pecan team, can be automated with minimal effort.”
Real-world application:
According to Pecan, Johnson and Johnson used the platform to predict changing customer behavior. The company also analyzed buying patterns across different consumer groups and supply chain forecasts.
“We improved forecast accuracy in our seasonal business, and we have a deeper understanding of the variables that may influence a consumer demand signal,” Johnson & Johnson VP Bertrand Klehr said in a press release. “[By] partnering together with Pecan, we are continuing our focus on what consumers want to purchase at the right time and place.”
“In one intuitive platform, analysts and business stakeholders can obtain actionable insights and see outputs in a matter of days after adding their raw data — helping companies evolve from BI to AI. We have seen tremendous uptake from organizations of all sizes and are looking forward to expanding globally and bringing real business value to our customers.”
