Pienso: The Democratization of Machine Learning

By Vic Singh, Founding General Partner, Eniac Ventures

Eniac is excited to lead Pienso’s seed round with our friends at SoftTech. Founded by seasoned MIT graduates, Birago Jones and Karthik Dinakar, Pienso is making machine learning accessible to enterprise domain experts who don’t have the requisite data science experience. As corporations heavily invest in big data lake initiatives to glean insights into their business, domain experts find it challenging to communicate their requirements to data scientists, often times those requirements get lost in translation.

Enter Pienso, a startup that has built a proprietary method called Lensing which uses machine learning to cluster data through an intuitive UI that domain experts (researchers at pharma companies, analysts at energy corporations, intelligence analysts etc.) can access directly to make sense of the copious data across the enterprise.

We are bullish on Pienso for a number of reasons. Most importantly, Eniac enjoys partnering with Founders with strong technical backgrounds. Birago specializes at the intersection of human-computer interaction and artificial intelligence and has a long successful career leading UI for companies. Karthik is a computer scientist specializing in machine learning and has been developing AI since he was 11 years old. The two have worked together for several years and their chemistry is infectious. We like to call them the UI meeting the AI! We were immediately drawn to their expertise, passion and vision.

“To make artificial intelligence more valuable, human expertise is needed in training the algorithm. In many cases researchers, analysts, and other knowledge workers do not have a computer science or advanced statistical background, so they rely on someone else to input their knowledge — unfortunately, often the nuance, context, and details get lost in that process. We created Pienso to allow the experts to train the algorithm and interact with their data.” — Birago Jones, Co-founder & CEO

Second, Pienso is already seeing demand from enterprises spanning intelligence to pharmaceutical. The platform is built and accessed in through the daily workflow of knowledge workers ultimately creating a product with massive lock in and network effects as new data sources and employees continue to access the product through a SaaS model.

Finally, the problem that Pienso is solving will only loom larger as investment by enterprise data initiatives continue to grow and will be at the heart of big initiatives and decisions undertaken by companies. Pienso’s machine learning platform gives a subject matter expert the tools to train interact and inject their information directly to the algorithms. Lensing helps creates a self-service platform which is a huge step towards the democratization of ML — now the people closest to the subject matter, can be the ones working directly with the modeling.

We are excited to partner with Birago and Karthik in this exciting phase of their business!

To learn more, visit www.pienso.com, check out their feature in TechCrunch and make sure to follow them on Twitter @Pienso.