AI in Retail

Mad Street Den raises $30M in Series C as it establishes itself as a leader ushering in AI transformation for Large Enterprises4 min read

January 12, 2023   |   3 min read
Shyam Ravishankar

Manager - Content and Digital Marketing

Mad Street Den raises $30M in Series C as it establishes itself as a leader ushering in AI transformation for Large Enterprises4 min read

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Mad Street Den, a leader in Enterprise AI, today announced a fresh round of Series C funding led by Avatar Growth Capital, with participation from existing investors Sequoia Capital and Alpha Wave Global (formerly known as Falcon Edge Capital). The investment will enable Mad Street Den to expand its artificial intelligence offerings across industries.

Mad Street Den has seen strong demand for its AI platform over the past 24 months. New growth has been powered by both the retail segment as well as its foray into new verticals like finance, insurance, healthcare, pharma, and logistics. The funding allows the company to double down on scaling the business across a wide range of verticals while holding firm as the Leader in Retail AI. 

Enterprises are buying the company’s AI stack, Vue.ai, across these industries to solve three complex problems with a single offering: to create clean & enriched data, power rich-personalized customer experiences and automate complex workflows dealing with a wide range of documents needing digitization and processing. It is fast becoming known for its 10x improvement over competitors in the market, thanks to both the efficacy of its AI capabilities and the wide range of use cases it powers. 

Vue.ai helps enterprises to significantly accelerate the process of creating and managing data model drift through automated AI / ML capabilities, enabling real-time decision-making and enhanced consumer experience.  Further, its capability to understand and infer all types of data including image, text, video, voice and in any form – structured, semi-structured or unstructured has allowed Mad Street Den to provide business solutions to extend to a true horizontal AI platform.

With a 3-layer architecture that includes a large private marketplace of models for instant-on applications, a data science hub and toolkit for enterprise engineering teams and a data platform to allow a variety of integrations including on-prem or private cloud, the company has been edging ahead of competition across multiple verticals by being an end-to-end AI provider rather than a point solution. The 3-layer architecture now empowers partners to embed the Vue.ai platform in their SAAS offering to accelerate growth.

Vue.ai’s data-centric approach vs. a model-centric approach has exhibited strong operating leverage for its enterprise customers. It bridges the gap of short supply of skilled data scientists and data engineers with its automated platform and in the process adds scale of operation, speed, accuracy, and significant cost savings. Vue.ai shows an order of magnitude quicker ROI to customers allowing rapid growth across departments and multiple use cases inside large organizations within 3 months, as opposed to the typical enterprise deployment cycles predominant in the market. 

The company also recently acquired INTURN, a New York-based enterprise solution that helps retailers monetize slow-moving and excess inventory, faster.

“At MSD, we’ve gone step by step in this vision we’ve had from day 0, of building a truly general AI platform, taking a vertical-first approach into Retail and then scaling that horizontally across several industries. What we needed at this stage of the company was partners that would help us bring discipline to the scaling and a very strong understanding of the GTM levers that get unlocked with building a horizontal AI platform for large scale enterprises. Abhay Havaldar & Vishal Bakshi from Avatar Growth Capital were everything Anand and I could have asked for, at this stage of the company’s growth. We’re very excited to have such veterans from the industry give us a strong guiding hand”, says Ashwini Asokan, CEO & Founder. 

“Enterprises today need to not only do things faster (automate processes and workflows) but also make decisions faster. Rule-based automation is not enough for tomorrow. Vue.ai’s ability to solve business problems across industries, use cases while maintaining efficacy at scale and low cost is highly differentiated. Further, its 30-60-90 days framework ensures customers do not need to wait for months to see results. We are very excited to partner with Ashwini, Anand, Costa and the entire MSD team,” said Abhay Havaldar, Founder and Managing Partner, Avatar Growth Capital.

About Avatar Growth Capital

Avatar Growth Capital is a specialist and thematic private equity firm investing in high-growth technology and software companies that are leveraging India to drive global digital transformation. Our team has over four decades of investing experience including 30 years at General Atlantic Partners and Goldman Sachs, further augmented by technology operations and investment banking advisory & consulting experience. Avatar’s mission is to identify, invest and work with visionary tech entrepreneurs and executives to build engines for growth and scale for long-term success.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Shyam Ravishankar

Manager - Content and Digital Marketing

A professional musician and a foodie, Shyam manages content and digital marketing at Vue.ai. He enjoys marketing almost as much as he enjoys cracking the worst jokes. You can find him at the best parties in town either performing at or attending them.