Hyper Anna has secured an $A1.25 million investment from Westpac’s venture capital arm, Reinventure and AirTree Ventures, to support further development of its natural language driven data analytics solution. The funds will be used to grow the business and help launch in the US in 2017.

The Sydney start up, led by co-founders and data scientists, Natalie Nguyen, Sam Zheng and Kent Tian, has developed a machine intelligence layer that allows people to interact with any collection of data they wish from any device they choose. Scheduled for general release in early 2017, Anna users can ask a natural language question of the data collection using voice, text or email.

The tool can be used to review existing data collections and to provide predictive insights without the need for a data scientist.

Hyper Anna is now working with IAG, and a project is underway with Westpac.

Nguyen explains; “Our vision is for people to be able to interact with big data by just asking questions in plain English about key drivers of the business like ‘how’s my sales doing’ and the machine intelligence agent just goes away, analyses sales pattern and brings back important insights for you.”

The solution also leverages machine learning to ensure that results improve with use.

Running on Microsoft’s Azure cloud or on-premise, data collections held in Software as a Service applications such as Salesforce and Google Analytics can be accessed using APIs, while any other data required for analysis can be loaded to the system for interrogation by Anna on an as-needs basis.

Being cloud-based was essential according to Nguyen. There is no app or software to install and user just need internet to access Hyper Anna with regularly refreshed data.

Nguyen says; “The brain of Anna constantly needs to reap feeds of data so it gets smarter – so having a central place for the brain to sit is extremely important and also helps with deployment time. We deploy literally within a day with Azure.”

According to Danny Gilligan from Reinventure, “The Hyper Anna team have built a product which can bring customised analytics services to the large, underserved market of corporate employees and small businesses. Great productivity gains will be possible when front line decision makers have the customised insights they need delivered to them in real time.  One of the cool things about Hyper Anna is it demonstrates the growing maturity of the data value chain, where two clever ex Quantium data scientists can build a new company to serve specific problems better than anyone else.” 
https://hyperanna.com/