Many companies grapple with data challenges. In a 2019 survey, Deloitte reports that 67% of executives aren’t comfortable accessing or using the data at their organizations. In a separate poll from NewVantage Partners, meanwhile, less than a third of firms identify themselves as being data-driven — despite significant investments in AI and business analytics tools.
According to Michael Amori, the problem often lies in tooling. He’s the co-founder of Virtualitics, a startup developing software to help companies visualize — and gain insights, with any luck — from their data.
“Common dashboard tools fall short of revealing the hidden insights buried in today’s intricate data,” Amori told me in an email interview. “And when bias, privacy and ethics are becoming even more important, having a solid understanding of the data, outliers and patterns, companies can create an environment of responsible usage.”
Virtualitics, launched in 2016, was born out of Caltech and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena. A few years ago, Amori was introduced to George Djorgovski, a professor of astronomy and data science at Caltech, and Ciro Donalek, a computational staff scientist at Caltech’s Center for Data-Driven Discovery, which Djorgovski was heading at the time.“Donalek’s expertise in AI, particularly in aiding Caltech astronomers with big data analysis, and his work in creating collaborative virtual spaces converged,” Amori said. “Virtualitics was born from this, focusing on three-dimensional visualizations to elevate data analysis beyond traditional methods.”
At a high level, Virtualitics uses 3D visualizations, knowledge graphs and AI to expose the relationships between different points of data. Given a data set (or several), optionally along with a question in plain English (e.g. “What drives credit card skimming?”), the platform can generate annotations and explanations, which can then be embedded in reports and dashboards and shared with stakeholders across an organization.
A customer in the financial industry could, for example, use Virtualitics to spot patterns of payment and wire fraud. Or a marketing company could leverage the platform to identify emerging customer segments and the marketing channels most likely to perform best.
But plenty of business intelligence tools visualize data, including Bayes, which Airtable acquired in 2021, and London-based, Canva-owned Flourish.
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