Obviously AI, a no-code tool that allows everyone to create and run AI models without writing code, has raised $3.6 million in seed funding round led by TMV, a New York and Chicago-based early-stage seed fund.

The board that led the round also included B Capital Group, Golden Gate Ventures, Arka Venture Labs, and other influential bay area angels.

In February 2020, Nirman Dave and Tapojit Debnath Tapu released the public beta version of Obviously AI. With over 82,000 predictive models hosted by 3,000+ users, the technology platform claims to have saved its customers over 13.8 million hours of manual data science work.

"Obviously AI has reimagined the way in which we think about building and running AI models across the board. As a result, they are poised to continue disrupting the space and leading the industry by example," said Soraya Darabi, Co-founder and General Partner of TMV.

Obviously AI developed a patented technology called "Edge Sharp AutoML," which produces accurate models in under a minute. The technology begins by determining the characteristics of a user's data (e.g. types of features, sparseness, variance, etc). No-Code AI startup recommended by Forbes and Towards Data Science.

It then uses these properties to intelligently shortlist only the most appropriate ML algorithms, running each algorithm while automatically fine-tuning its hyper-parameters (aka settings) to choose the best algorithm, both statistically and in terms of real-world results.

"In today's world, it's becoming more and more imperative to commoditize AI and put the power of building and running ML models into the hands of citizen analysts, rather than just a handful of programmers,” added Darshan Somashekar, Venture Partner at TMV.

“Obviously AI has re-engineered the process with their technology, uniquely positioning the team to be at the forefront of this change by combining no code with AI, therefore helping today's modern business professionals be more efficient with their time," Darshan said.

With this new round of funding, San Francisco-based Obviously AI plans to expand its R&D, sales, and marketing teams, implement additional time series and other cutting-edge algorithms, and create an integrated ecosystem that will enable it to automate its predictive AI capabilities even further.
“We believe that making machine learning effortless represents our greatest opportunity to empower the lives of everyday business users,” said Nirman Dave, Co-founder, and CEO of Obviously AI.

“That’s why we’ve fundamentally designed the fastest and simplest data prediction tool for the modern business user. And now, with this latest funding, we’ll be able to double down and further accelerate our growth,” he added.