Business intel and anomaly detection tool Anodot is looking for what doesn’t make sense.
“Traditional BI and visualization only gives you answers to the questions you think to ask, but when you’ve got a lot of data, doing that manually becomes almost mission impossible,” said Anodot CEO and co-founder David Drai.
The company raised an $8 million Series B round on Thursday led by Aleph Venture Capital with participation from Disruptive Technologies, bringing its total funding to $12.5 million since 2014.
Anodot is a SaaS platform that examines data streams in real time from wherever they’re flowing, including payments, impression-level data, ecommerce data or IoT signals, and pulls out insights based on historical benchmarks.
Drai, who most recently served as CTO of taxi-hailing app Gett (previously known as GetTaxi), claims that Anodot is the only company that analyzes data while it’s actually in the process of being transmitted.
“As a CTO, there were always challenges with business insights,” said Drai, who sold his content delivery company, Contendo, to Akamai for $268 million in 2012 before jumping on board at Gett.
“A lot of data gets collected,” he said. “But you need the right tools to identify and receive those insights.”
The idea behind Anodot was sparked by an experience Drai had at Gett, when there was a sudden, and initially inexplicable, drop in taxi orders in Russia. After 48 hours of disrupted service and no idea why it was happening, Gett finally figured out that certain telcos were blocking its SMS messages.
People simply couldn’t order taxis. And without a solid user experience in place, there’s no chance to engage, retain or monetize.
“We found that out late because we were counting on the BI we received every morning – static reports,” Drai said. “That’s why we thought of a product that could find answers and find anomalies automatically. If there’s churn happening because a partner is using the wrong JavaScript or there’s a revenue drop because of a bad integration or some other reason, you need to know why and you need to know it in real time.”
Beyond real-time damage control, some Anodot customers – clients include Wix, Microsoft, AOL, Rubicon Project and Credit Karma – use the platform to handle unexpected business opportunities.
“We have a client that automatically adds more servers to handle peaks in traffic,” Drai said. “We supply an understanding of what’s happening, and then the client provides the intelligence on top of it.”
According to Drai, Anodot’s biggest competition actually comes from internal legacy products developed within the companies it’s looking to sign on as clients.
That was almost the case with personal finance credit reporting and monitoring company Credit Karma, which was on the verge several months ago of building its own in-house tool for identifying business incidents when it came across Anodot and decided to partner instead, said Drai.
“But there are some cases where the capital has already been invested in machine learning and data analytics,” he said. “And then it’s more difficult for the company to justify the replacement of what they’ve already developed.”
Anodot plans to spend the bulk of its infusion on hiring in the US with a focus on sales and engineering. The goal is to roughly double company headcount from today’s 22 by next year. A portion of the cash is also being earmarked for R&D.
Founded in 2014, Anodot claims “several million” in revenue this year, with a plan to hit more than $5 million in annual contract value over the course of the coming year. The company has its headquarters in Israel, with additional spots in Silicon Valley and Germany.
