Plexe, an artificial intelligence firm backed by US start-up accelerator Y-Combinator, has raised $2.1 million (₹19 crore) in its seed funding round.

Founded by Calcutta-born Vaibhav Dubey and Marcello De Bernardi, Plexe builds artificial intelligence agents that can develop predictive machine learning models for organisations and enterprises. Dubey and Bernardi have worked together in Expedia in the past.

“Simply put, we are using AI to build AI. Instead of using AI to build websites and software, we are using it to build small models that essentially work as a machine learning engineering team, that are task-specific and trained on the company’s own data,” Dubey, who has studied in La Martiniere for Boys in Calcutta before heading to the UK for higher studies, said.

“For example, a retail company or an e-commerce company could have data on consumers, their past purchases, and current products that could be relevant to them. Now, instead of relying on an individual to analyse Microsoft Excel and to figure out which customer to reach out to through marketing campaigns, it’s entirely AI-driven. We are building tools for enterprises that look at customers’ previous purchases and figure out what products they may like to purchase now, which are the high-value customers and how customer services can be improved,” Dubey said.

Calcutta-based retail jeweller Senco Gold has received encouraging results from having tested models developed by Plexe, Dubey said.

Expansion plan

Having raised its seed fund, the start-up now plans to grow fast by hiring more engineers and setting up an AI engineering lab to build products and get more customers.

“With just my co-founder and me, we were able to reach six-figure annual contracts. So, there is a big scope for growth. But we want to make sure that the team is lean as we get towards our next milestone of the Series A funding stage. The plan is to reach that milestone in two years, but we hope that we will be able to reach there within one year,” Dubey said.

The company sees growth opportunities across a wide range of sectors such as retail, e-commerce, banking and financial services and cybersecurity.

“We have worked with about 15 clients and we are in discussion with about 10 more,” Dubey said.

The company is based in London, UK, but plans to expand to San Francisco in the US, with prospects of a presence in India in the future.

Data protection

Dubey said that a key focus area for Plexe, which works with corporate information, is data protection. “We are on track to get SOC 2 certification in the next one and a half months,” he said.

System and Organisation Controls (SOC) 2 is a compliance framework developed by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants. SOC 2 reports are used to assure clients of service providers that their data is handled securely and responsibly, particularly for organisations that store and process data in the cloud.