M12, Microsoft's venture capital fund, previously known as Microsoft Ventures, has completed a series of investments in recent weeks. Today, he runs a $ 5 million A Series in Cerebri AI, a startup that uses machine learning to help companies track, analyze, and predict the behavior of their customers.
The Horizon Fund of the University of Texas, WorldQuant Ventures and Leawood Venture Capital also participated in this round for the Austin-based startup, bringing Cerebri's total funding to date to $ 10 million . The company plans to use fresh money to expand its operations.
The implication of Microsoft is perhaps not a major surprise, given the company's interest in machine learning and that the Cerebri platform is above Microsoft Azure.
"Cerebri has created a product that fundamentally changes the way sales professionals and successful professionals can analyze the customer journey," said Elliott Robinson, associate at M12. " By allowing companies to track an individual customer through the various points of contact within the company, Cerebri has proven that they are able to enhance the customer experience and to generate income. "
In addition to today 's funding announcement, Cerebri has also officially launched today its product Cerebri Values, which it describes as "the first universal measure of customer success. ". The idea here is to quantify a customer's commitment to a brand or product. Then plan the "next best action" for each of these clients in order to close the deal. Like similar products, Cerebri Values also allows marketers to create cohorts of similar customers for marketing campaigns. The focus here is on grouping customers by behavior and not by demographics, which is a little different from the way similar tools often work.
To do all this, Cerebri allows its users to combine data from various sources, then uses its machine learning models to predict what will work best for that client. At a time when customers are increasingly wary of companies collecting their data, this may seem a little dystopian. Cerebri claims to have already absorbed more than two billion touch points and events out of 12 million consumers and that all this data is behind the company's firewall, "guaranteeing the highest level of security and protection of personal information. "
We asked the company if consumers can access this data or refuse to be tracked and have not yet received a response, but it seems that the privacy policy of the company The company claims that it is up to its customers to abide by local laws, including the likes of the GDPR of the European Union.