CognitiveScale, a provider of industry-specific machine intelligence software, today announced the completion of a $21.8 million round of financing co-led by Norwest Venture Partners and Intel Capital. CognitiveScale will use the funding to grow global sales and delivery and accelerate development of its product portfolio as organizations of all sizes transform for the new digital economy built on cognitive systems of intelligence. Norwest’s Promod Haque and Intel Capital’s Vibhor Rastogi will join CognitiveScale’s Board of Directors.
“Our cognitive cloud software pairs man and machine so they can achieve something new and exponentially valuable together: intelligent user engagement and business processes that get smarter and more useful with time,” said Manoj Saxena, Executive Chairman of CognitiveScale. “This funding will accelerate our mission to bring scalable, practical AI to the enterprise.”
Since emerging from stealth mode in October 2014, CognitiveScale has successfully deployed its products with Fortune 100 companies in financial services, healthcare, and commerce. With more than 60 patents filed around its Deep Cognition Engine, CognitiveScale’s industry specific artificial intelligence algorithms understand and adapt to changing user and market conditions while continuously reprogramming themselves to improve the quality of the insights they produce.
“CognitiveScale is reimagining enterprise engagement with machine intelligence and its tailored solutions are serving as the linchpin for engagement and productivity,” said Promod Haque, senior managing partner at Norwest Venture Partners. “Not only is CognitiveScale’s technology helping solve core problems for the enterprise, but its executive team is top notch, and we have complete confidence that they’ll continue to innovate and move the AI industry forward.”
The CognitiveScale team combines management expertise in key industry verticals as well as deep experience in both enterprise software and machine learning. The firm is led by industry leaders and serial entrepreneurs, including Saxena, CognitiveScale’s Executive Chairman who was the first general manager of the IBM Watson division; Chief Executive Officer Akshay Sabhikhi, who was previously the global leader for IBM’s Smarter Care; and Matt Sanchez, who led Watson Labs before becoming CognitiveScale’s Founder and Chief Technology Officer.
They were inspired by Watson’s potential and wanted to innovate and scale a new class of industry-specific AI that could address critical problems in industries such as financial services, retail, and healthcare.
“The impact of artificial intelligence continues to grow as we improve a machine’s ability to learn and predict using large amounts of data,” said Michael Greene, corporate vice president, Intel Software and Services Group and general manager of System Technologies and Optimization. “Machine intelligence systems that actively discover, act and learn from multi-structured data, like the one from CognitiveScale, will bring new innovations to the marketplace and complement technology initiatives such as the optimization of Spark analytics for Intel-based platforms.”
CognitiveScale is the sixth investment from the Intel Capital Diversity Fund.
Two Industry-Specific AI Products Power User Engagement and Process Intelligence
CognitiveScale provides two flagship products called ENGAGE and AMPLIFY that interpret multi-structured big data and weave knowledge and learning across the enterprise—from the front office to back office to mission critical core functions.
ENGAGE focuses on transforming customer experience at the edge of the business through any digital touch point. It interprets user goals, preferences, and context and delivers individualized insights by reasoning across billions of curated industry data points while learning continuously. While ENGAGE works at the edge, AMPLIFY works at the core of an organization. It helps augment knowledge workers with contextual insights and helps deploy self-learning autonomous processes modeled after human cognitive architecture.
Both products learn from new data and customer interactions and deliver future insights and advice that accounts for dynamic changes in goals, preferences, and the business environment. They are deployed through CognitiveScale’s secure and hybrid cognitive cloud foundation which can be implemented and scaled over IBM, Amazon, and Microsoft cloud infrastructures.
About CognitiveScale
CognitiveScale enables businesses to win with machine intelligence. The company’s products—CognitiveScale ENGAGE and CognitiveScale AMPLIFY help enterprises transform customer engagement, improve decision-making, and deploy self-learning business processes. CognitiveScale has successfully deployed its industry cognitive clouds with Global 500 companies in financial services, healthcare, and commerce.
CognitiveScale was founded in 2013 by highly successful serial entrepreneurs and senior executives with deep expertise in vertical enterprise software, cloud computing, and machine learning. The company has won numerous awards and featured in prominent research and publications. It is headquartered in Austin, Texas, with offices in the United Kingdom and India, and has strategic partnerships with IBM and Deloitte. To learn more, please visit www.cognitivescale.com or follow @cognitivescale.
About Norwest Venture Partners
Norwest Venture Partners is a global venture capital and growth equity investment firm that manages more than $6 billion in capital. The firm targets early to late stage venture and growth equity investments across a wide range of sectors including: technology, information services, business services, financial services, consumer products/services and healthcare. Headquartered in Palo Alto, Calif., Norwest has offices in San Francisco and New York, and subsidiaries in Mumbai and Bengaluru, India and Herzelia, Israel. The firm has funded more than 575 companies since inception. For more information, please visit www.nvp.com. Follow Norwest on Twitter @NorwestVP.
About Intel Capital
Intel Capital, Intel’s strategic investment and M&A organization, backs innovative startups targeting computing and smart devices, cloud, datacenter, security, the Internet of Things, wearable and robotic technologies and semiconductor manufacturing. Since 1991, Intel Capital has invested US$11.7 billion in 1,447 companies in 57 countries; in that timeframe, 605 portfolio companies have gone public or been acquired. Through its business development programs, Intel Capital curates thousands of introductions each year between its portfolio executives and Intel’s customers and partners in the Global 2000. For more information on what makes Intel Capital one of the world’s most powerful venture capital firms, visit www.intelcapital.com or follow @Intelcapital.
