Hyper Anna founders Sam Zheng, Kent Tian and Natalie Nguyen
Sydney-based artificial intelligence (AI) start-up, Hyper Anna, has raised $16 million in series A funding to boost its global expansion.
The company’s AI agent ‘Anna’ is a virtual data scientist that provides customers with business intelligence and on-demand insights based on natural language requests. The software is specifically aimed at the financial services sector.
The funding was led by Sequoia China, with significant investments from Airtree Ventures, Westpac Reinventure and IAG Firemark Ventures. Both Westpac and IAG are Hyper Anna customers.
The funds will be used for the company’s expansion into Hong Kong, Singapore, China and USA. Its Hong Kong office will open in September.
Moving into these markets also exposes the artificial intelligence software to new languages and cultures.
Hyper Anna co-founder and CEO, Natalie Nguyen, said many organisations in these markets were struggling to find data scientists to do the analytics and insights required.
“The idea behind Anna is that all businesses, regardless of scope or size, deserve to have access to data scientists to drive value from the data they create and own,” Nguyen said.
“With a shortage of talent in the market Hyper Anna allows customers to scale their data analysis requirements in a very efficient manner.”
Last year, the company secured $1.25 million in venture capital funding from Westpac Reinventure, and AirTree Ventures.
Hyper Anna was founded by three data scientists, Natalie Nguyen, Sam Zheng, and Kent Tian, who developed a machine intelligence layer running on Microsoft Azure which allows interaction with any collection of data from any device.
