Chata.ai Picks Up $2.5 Million in Seed Funding

Chata.ai announced they have raised $2.5 million in seed funding.

The Calgary-based AI startup raised the money exclusively from local investors. Along with the seed funding news, chata.ai plans to launch their flagship software at the QuickBooks Connect conference in Silicon Valley later this week. The seed funding will go towards commercialization and prepping chat.ai for rapid expansion and growth.

Chata.ai is a simple cloud-based software service that acts as a conversational analytics assistant, allowing users to access, search and analyze business data with natural human language. The company’s goal is to make the banal process of data interaction a little more palatable and navigable.

Co-founder and CEO Kelly Cherniwchan, as well as the whole development team at chata.ai, are looking to take advantage of the untapped value of business data. Many companies have droves of data sets at their fingertips but are unsure of how to best use it. Chata.ai’s first target is the accounting industry—a fairly traditional space in terms of AI and chatbot integration—with the company’s first software integration designed to work with popular accounting software QuickBooks Online.

“Our goal is to provide a service that will save time, boost productivity and enable better-decision-making for accountants, bookkeepers and, by extension, their customers,” said Cherniwchan.

The way chata.ai’s software works is through a direct connection to an individual’s QuickBooks Online data. Users will enter a query like, “how high were my sales for a particular product over the last three months,” and chata.ai’s assistant will deliver an answer back immediately. The software’s AI is still growing and being fine-tuned, but it can handle complex questions and includes functionalities integral to accounting, such as charting. Just ask and get the queried information back in a bar plot.

“We add real value by removing the need to do tedious tasks–like exporting data, fumbling through spreadsheets, doing manual calculations, or learning complex business intelligence tools,” said Cherniwchan.

Chata.ai promises that if their user’s time is worth $100 an hour, the investment into the software will be recovered in 17 minutes per month, or 48 seconds a day. The big sell is simply in the amount of time chata.ai saves by enabling consumers to answer easily sourced questions without actually poring through data themselves. Mobile access to chata.ai is coming soon as well.

The Calgary-based company officially set up shop in the city last month.