- Product management platform company Tara AI recently announced it raised $10 million in Series A funding
Tara AI, a product management platform company that utilizes machine learning to predict the technical tasks, engineering resources, and timelines needed for new software projects, announced recently that it raised $10 million in Series A funding led by Aspect Ventures with participation from Slack Fund.
And existing seed investors Y Combinator and Moment Ventures also participated in the round. Including this round, Tara AI has raised a total of $13 million.
And Tara AI is fixing the antiquated and completely manual product development process that causes enterprises to lose an average of $66 billion per year through inefficiencies in project scoping. And enterprises today are sitting on valuable data in their project management systems, git version control, and workforce directories. Plus Tara AI connects to this data and using machine learning models, predicts how to best build the software (technical tasks), how long projects should take (timeline) and who should execute (resources).
“It’s ironic the very teams delivering the world’s most widely used and innovative software, still don’t have a predictive solution for their own product development life cycle,” said Tara AI co-founder and CEO Iba Masood. “Tara AI is eliminating the status quo of flying blind – which translates into lost time and money – and is creating a new normal where product teams can securely build on best practices and institutional knowledge, enabling them to deliver better software faster.”
Currently Tara AI’s technology simplifies the process of building software by analyzing millions of open-source software projects from across the web to instantly create development tasks and timelines for product teams, enabling users to select the platform and features for their build based on TARA AI’s roadmap suggestions, generating a product scope and technical subtasks, and recommending the best engineering talent – internally and externally – to execute on the build, and using active feedback algorithms to monitor code commits and provide daily project updates. As of right now, Tara AI operates a contractor network of over 50,000 pre-screened developers.
“With 45% of IT projects running over budget and billions lost due to inefficiencies in product scoping and resource allocations, there is a clear market need for what Tara AI offers,” added Lauren Kolodny — a partner at Aspect Ventures. “By leveraging the latest techniques in AI and enabling more meaningful collaboration, Tara AI is creating the industry’s first comprehensive platform for product management.”
With this round of funding, Tara AI will be fueling both customer and team growth. And the company is planning to triple headcount in 2019, focusing primarily on securing engineering talent to complement its founding team — which consists of former Google and Apple engineers.
“Tara AI is changing the way software products get built, and we’re thrilled to continue working with them,” explained YC Partner Aaron Harris. “98.6% of the workforce is non-technical, including most project managers who are expected to make key estimations on crucial software projects. Tara AI helps teams scope their product builds, and in the process, is creating an entirely new category.”
Some of Tara AI’s enterprise customers include Cisco, Orange Silicon Valley, and Mower Digital. To date, its AI technology has ingested millions of data objects from publicly available data and it is growing at a rate of 20% resulting in increasingly accurate algorithmic results for every project.
