The San Francisco-based company was co-founded by Devavrat Shah, founder of Celect and director of MIT’s statistics and data science center, and Vinayak Ramesh, founder of Well Frame. With the new funding, Ikigai plans to expand its team from 30 to 70 by the end of the year. The company faces competition from C3.ai, Anaplan, Dataiku, and Hugging Face, but Shah believes Ikigai's focus on large graphical models for tabular data sets it apart.
Key takeaways:
- Ikigai Labs, founded by Devavrat Shah, has raised $25 million in Series A funding, bringing its total raised to $38.2 million. The company offers a no-code platform for prediction, sparse data reconciliation, and optimization.
- Ikigai's platform enables companies to create and deploy large graphical models to power apps within their organizations, assisting in forecasting, scenario planning, and analysis.
- Shah believes that large graphical models are superior to large language models for enterprise data, as they are well-suited for tabular, sparse, and time-stamped data and require less storage.
- With the new funding, Ikigai plans to expand its team from 30 to 70 by the end of the year.