Sydney's Hyper Anna gets $16m investment

Sydney-based AI powered data analytics start-up Hyper Anna has secured $16 million in Series A funding to help support its expansion into international markets.

The company’s funding round was led by Sequoia China and includes significant investments from Airtree Ventures, Westpac Reinventure and IAG Firemark Ventures. Westpac and IAG are both early customers of the company.

Hyper Anna will use the capital to further its efforts to expand into overseas markets including Hong Kong, Singapore, China and the USA. The company is on track to open a Hong Kong office next month.

Hyper Anna’s flagship product is Anna, a virtual data scientist that interacts with users through natural language to democratise data science. Expanding into new markets will allow Anna to learn about new financial markets and new languages and cultures.

“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. With a shortage of talent in the market, Hyper Anna allows customers to scale their data analysis requirements in a very efficient manner,” Hyper Anna co-founder and CEO Natalie Nguyen said.

“If you ask ‘how are sales going?’ and I told you that you had sold 100 units, on its own, that information does not provide much insight into the performance of the business. The intention is to track sales against time, and just like a human, Anna picks up on those nuances. Intent is something that humans have a knack for intrinsically understanding, but something that machines have traditionally struggled with.”

Pictured: NSW Minister for Finance Victor Dominello with Hyper Anna team members.

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