Taktile Raises $4.7m Funding led by Index Ventures to Accelerate Machine Learning Adoption in Finance

• Y Combinator, firstminute Capital, and 8 unicorn founders from GitHub, UiPath, Mulesoft and Datadog also join the round
• 89% of machine learning projects fail to reach production stages and deliver benefits to enterprises
• Financial services companies that deploy ML applications on Taktile are able to overcome both technical and business challenges that have held back wider adoption of ML

Taktile, a technology platform used by financial services companies to deploy machine learning applications, has raised $4.7m in seed financing led by Index Ventures, with participation from Y Combinator, firstminute Capital, Plug and Play Ventures and the founders of 8 unicorns, including UiPath, Datadog and Github.

Machine learning (ML) is transforming the financial services industry and applications such as credit underwriting are at the forefront of this transformation. As machine learning techniques uncover new predictors of creditworthiness, financial institutions can underwrite loans more profitably and, more importantly, expand access to credit to previously underserved communities and companies. Already today, Taktile’s fintech customers are relying on a treasure trove of data to accurately predict borrowers’ repayment behavior, allowing them to provide affordable loans to new customer segments.

While the value of ML is widely acknowledged, financial institutions typically struggle to adopt ML for three main reasons. First, they often lack the expertise to develop state-of-the-art machine learning models and train them on novel data sources (e.g. granular signals extracted from transaction data). Second, they lack the IT resources to develop and maintain the microservices needed to test, deploy, and monitor machine learning systems in production. Third, they face organizational and regulatory hurdles when adopting new technologies and significant efforts are needed to generate trust in new non-linear modeling techniques.

Taktile’s enterprise SaaS platform helps its financial services customers to deliver ML applications in a robust, transparent and collaborative manner. It supports both customer-built models as well as off-the-shelf applications that are based on pre-built components and are fully customizable. All applications are deployed and maintained on the Taktile Platform, which forms a central hub for an organization’s machine learning operations. It provides all stakeholders with extensive model reports as well as explainability features to generate trust among executives and compliance departments alike.

CEO and co-founder of Taktile Maik Taro Wehmeyer commented: “I have experienced machine learning generate significant business value for companies through better decision-making, but traditionally there has been a lot of hesitancy in moving forward. Some of it is cultural and some of it is technical. By bringing together a team with deep business and technical expertise, we believe that our platform can assist enterprises to finally realize the power of ML.”

Taktile was founded by Maik Taro Wehmeyer and Maximilian Eber in 2020. The pair met while studying at Harvard and were part of the leadership team of a firm building custom ML software, which they scaled to a team of around a hundred people across Europe and the United States. During this time, they developed large scale applications for banks and insurance companies and experienced the pain of moving ML to production firsthand. They set out to build Taktile to finally allow machine learning to be treated as a business decision rather than a technology project. Taktile will narrow the gap between trailblazing ML companies and the millions who are not reaping the business benefits of ML.

“If we are to see gains from machine learning, tools need to be understandable and accessible across stakeholders within organisations. Max and Maik are using their years of industry insight to build the best deployment platform for the financial services industry by supercharging data science teams and we couldn’t be more excited to be backing them.” – Carlos Gonzalez-Cadenas, Partner, Index Ventures

About Taktile:

Taktile is building the leading decision platform for the financial industry. Their industry-specific machine learning applications, which are available on their platform, include transaction classification, credit scoring as well as credit default prevention. Among others, Taktile is funded by Index Ventures, Y Combinator, and the founders of UiPath, Datadog, Github, Looker, and Mulesoft.