Abacus.AI Lands $22M Series B

Artificial intelligence startup Abacus.AI has raised $22 million in a Series B round led by Coatue, the company announced Wednesday. 

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With Abacus.AI, an organization’s team of developers–with access to the organization’s data–can use its platform to create deep-learning systems that can make accurate predictions without having to invest the time and resources to do so from scratch.

“You can imagine a large organization not having to build a 1,000-person data science (team) in the future,” CEO Bindu Reddy said in an interview with Crunchbase News.

Coatue led the round, with participation from Decibel Partners and Index Ventures. The company last raised a $13 million Series A led by Index Ventures in July 2020 and a $5.3 million seed round led by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt in June 2019.

Currently, Abacus offers use cases that deal with tabular data, but with the new funding plans on expanding into use cases that deal with language (text-based) and image data, Reddy said. The company will also expand its research and development and machine-learning engineering teams, with Abacus’ headcount going from 30 to 60 in the next year.

Abacus has more than 2,000 people using the platform on a monthly basis, with more than 100 models being created on a daily basis. The company also has more than 60 paying customers.

Abacus’ target customers are what Reddy refers to as “mid-tech” companies. They’re not the Googles of the world, but they’re the big pharmceutical or big retail companies that want to incorporate AI into their businesses. Those kinds of companies want models that perform well, according to Reddy.

“They don’t really care if it’s high-end tech or not, they want good performing models which they can use,” she said.

Many of the company’s customers are startups, but it also serves medium-sized companies like 1-800-Flowers as well as large organizations, such as pharmaceutical companies.

Abacus.AI, which was founded in 2019 and is based in San Francisco, is also introducing Abacus.AI Deconstructed, which offers pieces of the company’s fundamental platform individually. Instead of using the full end-to-end service, users can use just those parts they want.

“We think that Abacus.AI’s unique cloud service now makes state-of-the-art AI easily accessible for organizations of all sizes, including start-ups,” Coature general partner Yanda Erlich said in a statement. “Abacus.AI’s end-to-end autonomous AI service, powered by their Neural Architecture Search invention, helps organizations with no ML expertise easily deploy deep learning systems in production.” 

Illustration: Li-Anne Dias