INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
technologists themselves work
Today, one of the startups building such a tool has raised some capital, Tara.ai, a platform that uses machine learning to help an
platform.The funding for the company cofounded by Iba Masood (she is the CEO) and Syed Ahmed comes from an interesting group of investors
firm that puts a notable but not exclusive emphasis on female-founded startups) with participation also from Slack, by way of its Slack Fund
Previous investors Y Combinator and Moment Ventures also participated in the round
(Y Combinator provides an avenue to companies from its cohorts to help them source their Series A rounds, and Tara.ai went through this
process.)Tara.ai was originally founded as Gradberry out of Y Combinator, with its initial focus on using an AI platform for organizations
to evaluate and help source engineering talent: Tara.ai was originally that name of its AI engine.(The origin of how Masood and Ahmed
University of Sharjah in the U.A.E
that had problems getting hired because no one had ever heard of their university
Even so, they had won an MIT-affiliated startup competition in Morocco and relocated to Boston
The idea with Gradberry was to cut through the big names and focus just on what people could do.)Masood and Syed (who eventually got
married) eventually realised that using that engine to evaluate the wider challenges of executing engineering projects came as a natural
progression once the team started digging into the challenges and identifying what actually needed to be solved.A study that McKinsey (where
scope out the nature of the problem that needed to be solved, or the goal that an organization wanted to achieve; it is also used to suggest
own staff expertise, along with that from other recruiting platforms, to figure out which people to source from within the company
While there are some tools in Jira to help plan out projects better, Tara is proposing its platform as a kind of virtual project manager, or
an assistant to an existing project manager, to conceive of the whole project, not just help with the admin of getting it done.Notably,
the partner at Aspect who led the investment, said that one of the things that stood out for her, in fact, with Tara.ai, was precisely how
it could be applied exactly in those kinds of scenarios.Today, tech is such a fundamental part of how a lot of businesses operate, but that
In those cases, these companies would have traditionally had to turn to outside consultants to identify opportunities, and then build and
potentially long-term operate whatever the solutions become
important as traditional enterprises are required to get level with newer businesses, and the amount of talent they need to execute on these
powerful talent and engineering project search engine, and making it more powerful
That will include integrating databases of external consultants and figuring out how best to have these in tandem with internal teams while
keeping them working well together
And soon to come also will be bug prediction: how to identify these before they arise in a project
The company is releasing an updated AI engine to coincide with the funding.The Slack investment is also a notable nod to what direction
from what they could see of its existing and target customers, many were already using it and some have already started requesting closer
not rule out closer integrations with communications and other platforms that people use on a daily basis to get their work done: the idea
is to become a tool to work better overall.
