Insider Update, April 2024 Edition!
Welcome to our third newsletter. This is a periodic note we send out to update the universe of people who are helping us along in our journey.
Hello, Babbage Insight Insiders!
Fundraising
Since our previous newsletter landed, we have spent almost the entirety of our time meeting VCs for initial and follow-up conversations, and follow-up conversations, and follow-up conversations, and...! A few have been remote, but most have been in-person (thankfully, Bangalore is unquestionably the VC capital of India). The follow-up conversations have been especially useful and interesting to us because each of them has approached potential holes in our products from a vastly different perspective, thus requiring us to do heavy “homework” to improve our product thinking overall.
One of the more interesting discoveries we have made while approaching VCs is that, while venture round and ticket size are important… the vintage of the firm's current fund is an unstated but equally important factor. We have discovered what we thought to be “bad fit” VCs to be very interested in us because their fund just became ready to roll, while VCs we thought to be extremely well-suited to us have turned out to be completely unable to engage only because we just don’t fit into their 7-year time horizon.
Product
Babbage is your AI Data Analyst. It observes data, generates hypotheses and validates them to generate insights without being prompted, like a high quality human data analyst would. It then communicates the insights in a visual, natural language based, easy to understand fashion.
(each of the dashed boxes is an instance of an SLM/LLM used as a tool)
Babbage is a classic data science model that leverages fine-tuned SLMs/LLMs for multiple underlying functions. (Babbage is NOT a copilot; the SLMs/LLMs are never directly exposed to the users.) It learns the structure of the data warehouse and other patterns in the data, in order to generate hypotheses and provide exceptional insights.
The first validated use case of Babbage is to deliver exceptional insights to business decision-makers and enhance the weekly / monthly Business Review process. Currently, whoever runs the Business Review (typically a Head of Strategy, or Head of Business Finance) has to trawl through dozens of dashboards and reports in order to find significant talking points and set the agenda for the meeting. Then, various participating teams need to do in depth analysis to answer the “whys”. Despite this, a vast majority of the time in these meetings is spent re-analyzing why things happened the way they did, rather than in making decisions. Meetings typically end with analytics teams being tasked with doing specific further analyses.
Before…
After!
Babbage delivers customized and personalized reports to all participants, which tells them at a glance what has been happening in the business and why they have been happening. These reports are visual, easy to understand, annotated with natural language, and are personalized to the roles and interests of each user.
This way, the preparation time for these reviews can be cut significantly, and the meetings can now be largely focused on making decisions (rather than on analysis). Data Analytics teams are freed of the tactical questions that come out of such meetings, and can instead focus on more strategic value-additive work.
Babbage’s instantiation mirrors that of a new human Data Analyst joining a company: a one-time installation process that takes less than an hour. It is installed as a continuously learning node within the customer’s private cloud, next to the data warehouse. It is initialized with a set of key high-level metrics, and the sometimes complex queries needed to compute them.
Babbage ensures data privacy by default. Neither company data, nor metadata, escapes the company’s cloud: the data are only used to further improve the self-learning model, just like a human data analyst learns and improves on company-specific data.
Thank You
Reach out to us to learn more about how things are going!
Looking forward to working with you all,
Karthik & Manu
Co-Founders
Karthik Shashidhar (LinkedIn, Email) is Co-Founder at Babbage Insight. He is an award-winning data science leader, having performed multiple roles across data science and analytics over the last dozen years. Most recently, he was Senior Vice President of Data at Delhivery (India’s largest technology-first logistics company). Karthik has written a book on market design, written a column for Mint (India’s premier business newspaper) and taught at IIM Bangalore. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and Engineering from IIT Madras, and a PGDM (equivalent to an MBA) from IIM Bangalore.
Manu Bhardwaj (LinkedIn, Email) is Co-Founder at Babbage Insight. He has 15+ years of US-based technology product leadership experience, focusing on Enterprise SaaS platforms and investment banking technology. While in Chicago, he built consumer lending+BNPL+credit card B2B2C platforms at Amount Inc. and Avant, for clients including HSBC, PNC Bank and Capital One. While in New York City, he led risk management and software development programs at Deutsche Bank, JPMorganChase and Bloomberg LP. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and Engineering from PESIT Bangalore, and a PGDM (equivalent to an MBA) from IIM Bangalore.
