Big Data startup Aureus Analytics raises $850K in angel funding

Singapore- and India-based Big Data firm Aureus Analytics has raised its first round of funding of US$850,000. The funding round was led by Steven Sule, Partner, Naste Advisors. It also saw participation from marquee angel investors such as Rajan Anandan, MD, Google India; Arihant Patni, Co-founder, Hive Data; and Arun Venkatachalam of Murugappa Group. The funds will be used to enhance product development, and further expand the engineering and business teams. “We believe that the impact value of predictive and Big Data analytics is significantly higher if made available at the point of decision. Our aim to make this possible and bring the power into hands of the business users in an easy and seamless manner over the cloud. By our estimates, the global market opportunity for such solutions in the insurance industry alone is approximately US$ 9 billion to US$10 billion,” said Anurag Shah, CEO, Aureus Analytics. “We could not have asked for a better set of investors to back us at this early stage of our journey. This has reaffirmed our faith that what we are building is going to be a game-changer in the near future,” he added. Aureus Analytics has a suite of industry-specific predictive analytics products and Big Data-ready platform called ASAP. These products enable customers to tackle business critical issues by leveraging massive internal and external data sets at the point of decision-making, shared an official release. “Aureus’ focus on the insurance space allows it to be at the forefront of the industry, which will increase its utilisation of analytics tools to better understand its products and customers in the future,” said Sule. The startup was founded in 2013 by Shah, an Indian School of Business alumnus, along with Mumbai University alumnus Ashish Tanna, and Shivaji University alumnus Nitin Purohit. Aureus offers predictive analytics and Big Data-ready platforms to insurance companies and banks. The company has customers including Bharti AXA Life Insurance, Aegon Religare Life Insurance, General Insurance Council of India and a leading Indian bank. “We have engaged Aureus Analytics to help us understand our customer behaviour better and generate meaningful insights,” said Saujnaya Shrivastava, Chief Marketing Officer, Bharti AXA Life Insurance.