When Boston-based machine learning startup Indico announced in August it was partnering with Manulife — known in the U.S. as John Hancock — it turns out that was only the beginning of its ambitions in the financial sector.
Indico, an alum of Techstar Boston's 2014 class, recently closed a $1.2 million round of financing led by Boston-based venture capital firm .406 Ventures, founder and CEO Slater Victoroff told me. The funding round, which was originally disclosed in a Nov. 15 filing, also included local firms Hyperplane Ventures and Boston Seed Capital.
Since its founding in 2013, Indico has been about helping companies sort through large sets of unstructured data and glean emerging trends from them using machine learning algorithms. The startup has been providing its service in the form of APIs to analyze large swaths of images and texts for several industries, including marketing, media, retail, legal, public relations and finance.
With this new round of funding, Victoroff said, Indico is going further into the financial sector by building a machine learning software platform for companies working in insurance and asset management. Outside of John Hancock, Victoroff said Indico is working with a few other companies which he couldn't disclose.
The problem Indico is specifically solving for the financial sector, Victoroff said, is the need for analysts to go through hundreds of pages of filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, as well as news stories, about companies so that the analysts can recommend clients to buy, sell or hold stock for the aforementioned companies.
"It’s very laborious and something that quite frankly no human is capable of," he said.
With Indico's machine learning platform, Victoroff said, these analysts will be able to view summaries of articles and glean important details and trends from documents without having to look through every single page.
"We have the ability to allow each financial analyst to have their own personal [research] copilot," Victoroff said. "This is something that will be customized for each user and will sift through the myriad of data they're expected to every day."
Indico currently has 10 employees and over 5,000 developers using its service.
