Algorithmia lands $2.4 million in Seed Funding to Activate the Algorithm Economy; Launches App Store for Algorithms

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Algorithmia (www.algorithmia.com), a cloud marketplace for algorithms has raised $2.4 M in seed funding.

Algorithmia enables algorithm developers to combine and commercialize their algorithm implementations by making them more discoverable through an app store for algorithms.

Developers at companies, universities and organizations can easily find, test and implement these algorithms by accessing Algorithmia's universal API.

The financing was led by Madrona Venture Group with participation from Rakuten Ventures, Deep Fork Capital as well as prominent angel investors such as Oren Etzioni and Charles Fitzgerald. Algorithmia was founded by Diego M. Oppenheimer and Kenneth Daniel.

While algorithms are influencing consumers lives by helping them find friends, choose movies, and shop online; there is a huge untapped pool of algorithms being created for everything from creating better maps, finding the most qualified reviews, to analyzing DNA. Algorithms have the capability of improving many areas of our lives.

But most of these are trapped on paper and not only is this knowledge hard to find but also rarely is it in a usable state.

Algorithmia brings this groundbreaking knowledge to light and enables anybody and everybody to tap into it.

"Algorithms make applications smarter. We are building a community around algorithm development and implementation where state-of-the-art algorithms are always live and accessible to anyone," said Diego Oppenheimer, founder and CEO. "Early response has shown that exposing algorithms and offering them in an easy to use format is not only a time saver for companies but is an incredibly valuable resource in building the critical applications and thinking in new ways about product development. Developers who haven't had a platform for commercializing all their hard work are excited to see their work change lives."

Co-founders Oppenheimer and Daniel bring a depth of business, technical and data analysis experience to the company. CEO Diego Oppenheimer has over 10 years experience working in business intelligence and building data analysis products, most recently as part of the Microsoft Excel Business Intelligence team. Kenneth Daniel has spent the better part of his life as an algorithm developer including developing marketplace theory for the U. S. Department of Transportation and pursuing his PhD in Artificial Intelligence at USC. The founders met at Carnegie Mellon University.

"Most algorithms never see the light of day because they are trapped in academic papers. Algorithmia could become a key platform where algorithmic innovation meets the market," remarked Oren Etzioni, entrepreneur and CEO of the Allen Institute of Artificial Intelligence.

"By crowdsourcing the algorithmic knowledge of the world in a way that it can be easily combined, we are building a world class intelligence library, " added Kenneth Daniel, founder and CTO. "This is a novel approach to achieving some of the goals of Artificial Intelligence."

"The time is now for a marketplace of algorithms. Ubiquitous cloud computing resources, the rise of composite applications connected by API's, and the desire of application developers to unlock their data with algorithms and advanced analytics are all major drivers we see with customers every day.

Algorithmia creates a place where businesses can easily discover and experiment with a wide variety of algorithms on their own data, while avoiding all the hassles of IT or provisioning infrastructure.

We love the value proposition for both the demand and supply side of the marketplace, and Kenny and Diego are an amazing founding team who have both the technical and business chops to build this vision into reality," said Tim Porter, Managing Director at Madrona Venture Group who will be joining Algorithmia's board.