Derek Wang (right), Founder and CEO of Stratifyd, and Brad Fleeman (left), VP of Global Sales, are making data analytics – from data collection to collaboration – more efficient for corporations through Stratifyd’s platform powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning.
Large companies are experiencing a data problem – more and more information is becoming digital and valuable business insights can be extracted for important management decisions such as new products or expansion into new markets. Available data is continuously growing and companies need to glean actionable insights quickly to stay ahead of the competition.
The issue isn’t only the enormous amount of data, but also, the increasing number of resources needed to analyze and present insights from it. So as data expands, organizations could hire more business and data analysts to mine the data, perform analyses, and present the results, but this solution becomes unprofitable as salary and healthcare costs steadily increase. Derek Wang, Founder and CEO, and the Stratify team are giving companies another option – the Stratifyd platform.
The platform uses artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to very efficiently perform data analytics with customized-visualization capability. Analysts today, Wang explains, “find the data, clean it, model it, run it through different analytic tools, [interpret] those results, and present it. It’s a very slow process. What we’re providing is – ‘let’s shrink this into one and [make it] very efficient.’”
The Stratifyd team puts the platform in the hands of employees, who choose how the data should be carved and presented. The analyst is the driver – it’s unrealistic for Stratifyd to tell a Fortune 500 company how to run the business. Wang’s goal is to augment analysts’ skillsets in order to maximize the business’s top-line potential. They want to make a company’s data analytics, “even stronger, even faster, even more efficient”, Wang says. And large companies are bought into this mission -- some of their earliest clients are Ally Bank and Lenovo.
There are numerous ways within a company in which Stratifyd could add value – tracking impressions and feedback from marketing campaigns, better understanding associate satisfaction surveys, and real-time managing a product’s lifecycle, to name a few.
One area that sees quick ROI is customer experience. Thousands of reviews, questions, and complaints come through all different channels, and most of the data is unstructured text – which is very cumbersome and difficult to analyze quickly. With more efficiency and accurate analysis, the customer satisfaction team – through the Stratifyd platform – can extract and relay actionable findings to management, “so the product team can make better products, better solutions for the customer”, Wang explains.
The Stratifyd team is very product driven. They focus on providing a high-quality and easy to use product. Wang mentions – “every deal we sign, it’s not just revenue, we are impacting people’s way of doing their work, and that’s what gets me excited.”
Wang has lived in the Charlotte area for the past twelve years, originally moving to the area to pursue his Ph.D. in Computer Science at UNCC. In 2014 and in his late twenties, after earning his doctorate and working as the Associate Director of the Charlotte Visualization Center, he decided, instead of immediately starting his work towards professor tenure, he would start Stratifyd – why not try while he was young?
Since then he’s focused on growing the global, SaaS-based B2B company here in Charlotte, and has attracted talent from across the country – from places like San Francisco and Seattle. They hired Brad Fleeman in 2016 – a successful global sales leader from CA Technologies – to run the global sales team.
Wang sees Charlotte’s work-life balance and the overall nicety attitude of the city as key differentiators – plus it’s to some of our nation’s largest banks. They’ve started to get notoriety around the city, and in April they won a Blue Diamond award for Business Value – Analytics & Big Data.
They recently raised $5.9M as part of their Series A, which will help accelerate growth, customer acquisition, and marketing globally. Stratifyd has offices in London – which focuses on the EMEA market – and Beijing.
Wang is passionate about advancing the entrepreneurial ecosystem in Charlotte. Stratifyd has partnered with the Computer Science department at UNCC, to give licenses to students with the goal of learning how to better analyze data. He’s also putting the platform in the hands of business students so that they can become familiar with the business intelligence space.
His advice to entrepreneurs is to simply – “take the leap of faith and jump.” From there form a personal community whether it’s friends or family, but it’s especially important to connect with fellow entrepreneurs.
You can learn more about the Stratifyd platform and the team here - https://www.stratifyd.com/company.
