Leveraging AI to Boost Decision Intelligence and Business Success: Why We Invested in Silico.ai
We’re excited to announce that we’ve backed London-based Silico in a £3.4 million Seed round alongside existing investors Forward Partners and high profile business angels from the B2B enterprise field. Silico is developing an AI-powered low-code/no-code simulation software that allows businesses to generate forward-looking insights by building decision models. Here’s why we invested.
As data networks become increasingly complex in all aspects of our lives, so too do the decisions that must be made surrounding them. Are organizations able to keep up?
As of right now, it’s looking like the vast majority could use some help. A 2021 study by Gartner revealed that two-thirds of decision makers and managers were making complex decisions with more pressure to explain or justify them. That’s because the data streams they work with tend to be both siloed and ever-changing. Data that’s embedded in multiple business processes is tough to harness and analyze in the context of decision making.
Silico is showing us that the solution to this global business conundrum is in AI and automation. The company’s groundbreaking simulation platform allows businesses to have cross-organizational flexibility in decision modeling with non-static data.
We’re thrilled to back the Silico team, support their growth and connect them with enterprises looking to drive down costs and align strategic outcomes.
Silico allows you to test decisions before making them.
Silico goes beyond modeling existing business processes to allow businesses exploration and testing of various decision outcomes. Companies can measure the impact of decisions surrounding lead generation, budget allocation, customer journeys and supply chain management.
The best part is that no one has to be a data scientist to navigate the platform. Silico’s powerful low-code/no-code UX connects to a wide variety of data sources with simple APIs. Moreover, the simulation software crunches huge amounts of data in seconds, alternates variables and returns the outcomes of strategic decisions.
Silico Co-founders John Hill and Chris Spencer want to show their clients how to steer their businesses toward desired outcomes. That means trying things out in a simulation before taking the bigger risk in the real world.
Companies are already seeing the value of Silico’s platform: It’s an easy-to-use, drag-and-drop decision making framework that all department owners can understand. It allows managers to collaborate on next steps for the whole business, preventing the dreaded data siloing. Low-code platforms like Silico actually promote the democratization of technology within organizations to help them win against the competition.
Let’s consider a few scenarios where Silico can transform business outcomes:
- Simulating the impact of business and digital transformation initiatives on key metrics to compare ROI
- Simulating sales and marketing processes to predict revenue timing under a range of budget allocation scenarios
- Simulating the profitability of new products to aid product design and market segmentation
- Simulating revenue across a portfolio of products and geographies to identify key value drivers and identify opportunities for product expansion
Why we invested in Silico
“At Join. we’re strong believers that low-code/no-code decision intelligence software like Silico will be the basis for future decision making,” says Sebastian von Ribbentrop, Join Capital Founding Partner. “Machines are getting much better at automating manual tasks, but they lack the nuance and understanding that humans have. We’ll be supporting John, Chris and the rest of the team in their journey to make decision intelligence a practical discipline for business leaders.”
Silico’s CEO and Co-founder, John Hill, said that he’s delighted to unlock the value of key markets in mainland Europe and a network of corporate customers. “We’ve been privileged to have spent time getting to know the team at Join Capital. Our values are fully aligned and we could not think of a better partner to work with as we embark on our next stage of growth.”
Our motivation to back the Silico team boils down to two major factors:
A team with a strong domain expertise in simulation and enterprise sales.
- Masterminds John (CEO), Chris (CTO), and Rodney (Head of Sales) met and worked together at Simudyne, a simulation software startup for financial institutions.
- John has 10+ years of experience in modeling & simulation, formerly as an Economist at the Bank of England and later as Head of Simulation at Simudyne.
- Chris has 10+ years in building simulation software and was Head of Engineering and acting CTO at Simudyne.
- Rodney was Head of Sales at Simudyne and boasts 20+ years in Enterprise Sales at Thomas Reuters.
The industry-agnostic USP of handling complexity.
- A transparent, low-code/no-code platform like Silico allows non-data scientists to feed live data from Salesforce, SAP or similar into the simulation engine and perform direct and forward-looking simulations. This is in contrast to traditional robotic process automation, which only offers snapshots with manual data input required.
- Transparent models — rather than black boxes — can be built for a variety of use cases, from supply chain to marketing, and the software runs billions of computations in a matter of minutes. For example, we’ve already introduced the team to two potential customers in the automotive and chemical industries.
For more information about Silico, please visit https://www.silicoai.com/ or drop us a line at hello@join.capital.
