Ratan Tata invests in award winning big data start-up, Crayon Data

Singapore/Chennai - November 24, 2015 –Ratan Tata, Chairman Emeritus of Tata Sons, has made a personal investment of an undisclosed amount in Crayon Data, one of Asia’s fastest growing big data companies. Today, enterprises all over the world are looking for innovative ways to create optimal customer experiences. Crayon’s flagship product Maya^TM is a personalisation engine that empowers enterprises to deliver ultra-personalized choices to their consumers. Crayon is developing a global consumer taste fabric, which currently maps choice across 15 categories, using complex machine-learning techniques and proprietary cognitive thinking algorithms. This taste fabric is then mapped to vast internal (enterprise) and external (online) data sets to provide a set of highly personalized choices to consumers. Crayon’s unique proposition has resulted in multiple clients across international markets, in the past year alone. Crayon, a portfolio company of Jungle Ventures, has been accredited as one of the most successful and innovative big data start-ups in 2014 and 2015, by global platforms such as TiEcon, CEBIT, IBM Watson, Intech50 and OrangeFab. Srikant Sastri, founder of Crayon Data, said, “We are excited and honored. To meet Ratan Tata and have our vision validated by him is an accolade in itself”. Srikant Sastri and Suresh Shankar founded Crayon in 2012. Crayon has previously raised approximately S$ 10 million in seed and Series A funding from angel institutional investors like Jungle Ventures and Spring Seeds. Mr. Tata recently joined Jungle Ventures as a special advisor. Anurag Srivastava of Jungle Ventures said, “We have always strongly believed in Crayon’s proposition. Srikant and Suresh, with their years of experience in Marketing and Analytics, have always had a clear vision of the value Crayon can bring to consumer-facing enterprises. “ About Crayon Data: Based in Singapore, Crayon Data is a big data start-up, with an ambitious vision to ‘simplify the world's choices’.  Crayon’s flagship product Maya^TM is a personalization engine that facilitates choice delivery for the banking, hotel and digital media verticals. Maya ^is built on Crayon Data’s proprietary platform, SimplerChoices^TM, which empowers enterprises with ability to deiver ultra-personalized choices to their consumers. It does this by creating a consumer taste fabric, using over 14 recommender systems and proprietary cognitive thinking TasteGraph^TM algorithms to work on vast internal and external data sets. Crayon has won several awards. The TiE Silicon Valley's "2014 Global Hot Technology Start-up Watch List"; was a finalist in IBM's Watson Mobile Developer Challenge in 2014, at CeBIT CODEn in 2014 and at OrangeFab in 2015.