Business Showcase : Xpanse AI

By @SimonCocking

Describe the company – the elevator pitch …

Xpanse AI is a SaaS platform that automates the most time-consuming and manual tasks when delivering Predictive Analytics.

Traditionally it would take many weeks if not months for a Data Scientist to aggregate the data from a relational database to the Modelling format.

Xpanse AI does it automatically within minutes or few hours tops – depending on the data size and its complexity, and it builds Predictive Models on the top of that.

How are you different?

It is a first-of-its-kind automated solution – let’s call it Automated Feature Engineering, for tasks that many deemed in the past as non-automatable.

This is software that automatically builds software and at a scale massively outreaching the manual approach.

Other than that, we are a typical startup, just with a higher than average founder’s age, haha.

Wait – “software writing software” – sounds to me a bit like Skynet?

It’s the first half of it (laughs). No, it’s just a tool that is smart enough to replace months of mundane data wrangling with automated processing.

There is a lot of brute force in it but also a lot of clever algorithmics, so it’s a good problem for machines to work on.

In a sense, we solved the same problem for relational data that Deep Learning solves for images and audio, enabling true image or voice recognition.

Why will the company/product do well?

We built this tool for Data Scientists frustrated by the amount of effort and time they need spend on manual data wrangling.

To quote one of the senior analytics manager after he saw what Xpanse AI can do: “this will give me my life back!”.

We hope Data Scientists will appreciate the ability to deliver analytics much faster and on a much broader scale while their business partners will be able to work with more insight about their customer base than ever before.

Where are you based?

We reside in Sandyford in south Dublin.

When was the company launched?

Officially we registered the company in 2015 but we are rolling out the Platform for self-served Predictive Analytics right now.

What have been your biggest wins to date?

We delivered a suite of Predictive Models for a US based company within 5 days of effort and without writing a single line of code.

Delivering in the traditional way would take at least 100 days of mainly manual coding – also it probably wouldn’t have been financially viable for the client without Xpanse AI in the first place.

What type of people (market segment) are you trying to attract to your product?

We are targeting three major segments: the traditional consumers of Predictive Analytics, such as telecoms, gaming or insurance companies.

Secondly, we want to help external consultants to deliver analytics faster and cheaper to their client base.

Thirdly, we hope that with much lowered delivery cost for Predictive Analytics, many companies or industries will now find new opportunities and applications.

What tips would you give to others looking to build their business?

Validate that the problem you are solving is worth solving.

Many people throw themselves at the problems that are not painful enough for sufficiently large population of potential clients.

The world is full of problems waiting to be solved but only a small number of them are worth solving right now.

Tell us about your team?

The team is very small, 3 founders with a combined 30 years of analytical experience, one person responsible for commercials and an offshore software development partner.

We have been outsourcing a lot!

What are your longterm plans for your product/company?

Becoming a part of a toolset for all of those Predictive Analytics practitioners who want to radically speed up their model delivery cycle.

We will also continue R&D of automation opportunities for analytics.

What are your favourite tech gadgets?

Not sure if it qualifies as a gadget but I keep my gaming PC at a quite high spec for a reason!

Also, wireless headphones with active noise reduction – very useful for air-travel.

What tech gadgets do you wish you could use to help you?

I wish there was a way to demo a product mixed with a slide deck – all from a mobile phone, it would really make life easier for many startup founders I am sure!

How do people get in touch with you?

Anyone wanting to know more can visit the website: www.xpanse.ai or get in touch at: info@xpanse.ai.

If you would like to have your company featured in the Irish Tech News Business Showcase, get in contact with us at Simon@IrishTechNews.ie or on Twitter: @SimonCocking