Artificial intelligence may make some of us think about everything from "The Terminator" to Alexa setting a timer for the mac and cheese. But for big enterprise operations, it's more about the promise of finding new insights and being more accurate and efficient with heaps of perviously unintelligible data.
And Hypergiant Industries, a fast-growing AI company with offices in Austin, Dallas and Houston, has become one of the go-to players for enterprise-scale companies that hope to start leveraging and training AIs to get ahead of the competition.
To that end, Hypergiant on Wednesday announced it has secured strategic investments -- the amount undisclosed -- from a sprawling business organization, as well as a few interesting angel investors.
Leading the new investments were Sumitomo Corporation of Americas and Dallas-based venture capital firm Perot Jain, the VC branch of Perot Companies. Also in on the new funding were Align Capital, former Dell CFO Tom Meredith and Austin Mayor Steve Adler.
Hypergiant, which now has more than 160 employees across its offices, also noted that it's on track to reach $100 million in revenue -- an astounding pace for a company that just emerged from stealth a little more than a year ago.
“Hypergiant has an opportunity to build a market-dominating company that is fueled by machine intelligent technologies,” Ross Perot Jr., chairman of the Perot Companies, said in a news release. “We backed Ben and his team because they have demonstrated an unbelievable capacity to execute in a very short period of time.”
While the size of Hypergiant's new investment remains undisclosed, the company made it clear the partnerships it represents could be game-changers.
Sumitomo Corporation, though not a household name, is a global trading powerhouse and has more than 900 subsidiaries and associated companies. It has ties to entertainment, risk management, manufacturing, food and even scooters.
Meanwhile, Hypergiant has already forged partnerships General Electric and Adobe, and it counts TGI Fridays, Bosch, Wingstop and HarperCollins Publishers as clients. The company says its full roster includes businesses in the oil and gas, manufacturing, automotive, aerospace, healthcare and government sectors.
Hypergiant has also been teaming up with and investing in other AI-oriented startups. Hypergiant's LP fund, which backs other AI startups with $100,000 to $1 million investments. Its investments have included Austin’s Pilosa, Cerebri AI and ClearBlade.
Hypergiant has also been busy in the acquisition space, scooping up SEOPS and Black Pixel in recent months.
