Infosys’ Kris Gopalakrishnan invests in big data startup Crayon Data

Infosys co-founder Kris Gopalakrishnan has made a personal investment in Crayon Data, a Singapore-based big data startup.

Kris Gopalakrishnan

The investment is part of Crayon's Series A2 round of funding, and the company will use the funding to further enhance its flagship product Maya and expand the company's global footprint.

Previous investors in the company include Jungle Ventures, Tata Sons chairman emeritus Ratan Tata, Mitsui & Co., Ltd. and many prominent angels.

''I see that the future of business will be the ability to leverage AI and big data to create 'personal' digital experiences for millions of customers. Crayon has a unique ability to bridge multiple worlds: analytics to digital, offline to online, internal, and external data,'' Kris Gopalakrishnan said.

''This makes them as critical to credit cards, travel and hospitality, and retail enterprises, as a Bloomberg terminal is to traders today,'' he added.

Crayon's flagship product Maya currently powers the largest credit card issuer in India, the number one bank in the UAE, a global credit cards leader in the US, one of the largest airlines in the world, and other similar enterprises.

Crayon's banking clients run custom campaigns with Maya. Maya has delivered over 20 million impressions for 8 clients.

Crayon's TasteGraph globally maps nearly 4 million restaurants, over a million hotels and 500,000 attractions, among other categories.

''Crayon's global TasteGraphTM maps tastes the way others map location or social networks. Our Choice AI is a recipe that allows us to bring together and match different data sets to create individual 'taste fingerprints,'' Vijaya Kumar Ivaturi, Co-founder and CTO of Crayon Data, said.

''In 2016, Gartner forecast that businesses will rapidly realise the need for digital personalisation and recognised Crayon as a significant player in this space. We see increasing adoption this year already,'' he added.