Thousands of new startups are launched every year. While artificial intelligence, machine learning and big data technology are transforming all sectors, AI-oriented initiatives play the leading role.

TAZI.AI, a venture that provides easy-to-use, no-code, adaptive and transparent machine learning (ML) solutions, has raised $4.6 million in a round of financing led by Illuminate Ventures, a seed stage Enterprise/B2B software-focused venture capital (VC) firm.

The round was also joined by Diffusion Capital Partners, Foothill Ventures, Handshake Ventures and angel investors.

The funding came as TAZI.AI announced the official launch of its machine learning solutions, especially for insurance, health care and pharma industries, built on its software as a service (SaaS) machine learning platform.

The TAZI users will now be able to create machine learning models and start seeing business results in as little as 40 days, according to its co-founder and CEO, Zehra Çataltepe.

"The investment will help us expand our team and grow our base of enterprise customers. My aim is to make ML accessible for everyone; even my mom should be able to use it soon," Çataltepe said.

Investors

Getting continually improving predictive insights is critical for enterprises to serve their customers better.

"TAZI.AI does just that by putting the power of ML directly into the hands of business users and letting them build and deploy continually improving predictive models in a fraction of the time of existing approaches," said Jennifer Savage, partner at Illuminate Ventures.

"TAZI.AI’s approach can also help early adopters, such as those in the insurance and health care industries, gain the benefit of ML without the need for substantial financial investment in talent or computational resources to use ML at scale."

Alper Karagöz, a partner at Diffusion Capital Partners, said: "We’ve been supporting TAZI.AI since their first institutional round. We’re happy to participate in their new financing round as the company expands its customer base."

Bill Elmore, long-term industry veteran and founder of Handshake Ventures, said TAZI’s "strong product and the team led by the impressive co-founders Zehra and Tanju will help the realization of their vision; this is definitely worth our support."

Pioneer in machine vision

Vispera, which offers the technologies it has developed in the field of machine vision and machine learning as a solution to the fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) and retail sectors in more than 30 countries, has started preparations for its growth target in the U.S. and Europe.

After establishing Vispera Corp. in the U.S., the image recognition-based technology developer startup, which completed a new investment round in January, is working to expand its customer portfolio and the range of business partners in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (MEA) and Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) regions with its U.K. office.

Aiming to become the world’s largest technology provider in the field of image recognition (IR) for the retail sector, Vispera plans to take steps such as continuing to develop innovative products by expanding its research and development (R&D) and software development teams, as well as maintaining its quality service by growing its sales and customer support teams in the future.

High-tech unicorn

"2022 has been a very active year for Vispera from its first days," said Vispera co-chief executive Aytül Erçil.

"We are advancing our collaborations with leading companies such as Capgemini, Zebra and Shelvz. We attended the Retail Technology Show and Eurocis with HP and the Reflexions event with Zebra. In the coming months, we will continue to participate in events with strong business partners," Erçil noted.

"At this point, developments that are important for the sector, such as the Turquality program in our country, make us happy. With the power we get from our achievements, we are rapidly advancing toward our goal of becoming Türkiye’s first high-tech unicorn by using such supports effectively to become the world’s largest IR technology provider in the retail field."