Outlier Receives Strategic Financial Investment From Capital One Growth Ventures

By Noah Long • Aug 26, 2019
  • Outlier announced that it accepted a strategic financial investment from Capital One Growth Ventures. The terms of the deal were undisclosed.

Outlier has announced that it accepted a strategic financial investment from Capital One Growth Ventures. The terms of the deal were undisclosed.

Outlier’s Automated Business Analysis (ABA) offerings go beyond dashboard visualization, data aggregation, storage, and reporting for offering proactive and actionable insights based on large volumes of data. And Outlier discovers unexpected changes and patterns in data automatically, guiding teams toward the most relevant and critical changes across the organization daily, and offering correlation and root-cause analysis.

Capital One Growth Ventures decided to invest in the company because it recognizes a growing need to identify key changes in patterns, including customer trends, financial data, or fraudulent activities.

“Working with Capital One Growth Ventures is a great testimonial for Outlier. Capital One recognizes the need to deliver ongoing and actionable insights that lead to immediate business improvements,” said Outlier co-founder and CEO Sean Byrnes. “This investment is helping us expand quickly into the financial services sector.”

ABA platforms such as Outlier utilizes AI and act as a virtual business analyst. And Outlier performs data analysis quickly and intelligently to uncover unexpected data behaviors and changes that are undetectable through other analysis methods. Plus ABA automatically finds and serves insights in the form of daily Stories directly to businesses, unlocking the data by finding hidden threats or opportunities that human analysts cannot find.

As part of the offering, Outlier’s daily Stories provide customers with the top 4-5 questions they should be asking about their business. And the Stories offer contextual information on any data behavioral change, related data and potential impact on the system, and possible causality factors.

“As organizations continue to wrestle with increasing volumes of data, they are looking for ways to understand and prioritize changes in their business,” added Capital One Growth Ventures partner Venkatesh Seetharam. “Outlier enables the ability to sift through large data sets and deliver insights in the form of ‘Stories’ to elevate anomalies that may require immediate attention. This allows organizations to leverage employees for high-value tasks and removes heavy manual data shuffling and analysis.”

Outlier offers dozens of types of Stories and recently launched Rank Stories and Data Quality Stories:

1.) Rank Stories: Most business intelligence tools struggle to identify changes in customer segments that offset each other. And when one segment increases and another decreases, those changes cancel out when viewed through top-level metrics. Outlier’s new Rank Stories are able to identify and summarize compositional changes across the many dimensions of your customers, ensuring that users know when and how demographics are shifting.

2.) Data Quality Stories: The hardest part of working with data is knowing whether it can be trusted. And Outlier’s two new Data Quality Stories automatically identify data quality issues like missing data and corrupted data thus ensuring that customers know when there are problems that need to be fixed. These new Stories ensure that there is no confusion between real business insights and artifacts of data quality problems.

“Fraud continues to be a concern for banks and financial institutions,” explained 451 Research research VP Matthew Aslett. “Some fraudulent behavior appears to be oddities in customer behavior. ABA platforms like Outlier track changes in customer behaviors and can be used by financial institutions to identify systemic fraud or organized crime.”