ThetaRay

Creating Companies: Sourcing from the Ecosystem

In 2012, JVP set out to find a technology that would make it possible to “find a needle in the haystack”, recognizing the need for an artificial intelligence oriented technology that would be able to sort through endless amounts of domain agnostic, heterogeneous data and aimed towards the detection of various anomalies. In 2012, JVP canvased academic institutions to identify new approaches which would include deep learning and artificial intelligence capabilities, initiating a dialogue with two leading mathematicians – Prof. Ronald Coifman, from Yale, who served for 20 years on the advisory board of DARPA and was a winner of the US Presidential Medal for Excellence in Science and Prof. Amir Averbuch from Tel-Aviv University, who is considered to be one of the corner stones of Israeli Mathematics and Computer Science, mentoring over 30 PhD and 120 MSc students. The JVP team worked with them for a full year, to validate the relevancy of their approach to multiple other problem domains.

In March 2013, the company joined the JVP Labs with seed investment from JVP and with the Intellectual Property licensed from the academic institutions. Over the coming 12 months JVP brought on board a seasoned CEO while initiating work to analyze the market and identify the right product, with a view to creating a generic platform out of the core technology. In the coming months, the company was introduced to GE which ultimately became both an investor and strategic partner, as the company sought to grow its offering into the critical infrastructure (e.g., power plants, electricity grids and smart cities) market, establishing a platform approach.

With this industrial internet solution in place, JVP and ThetaRay’s management moved to identify additional core markets, such as fintech. This market was undergoing a transformation and stood to benefit from the company’s unique platform in a variety of use cases, from anti-fraud, anti-money laundering, risk management and opportunity identification through to cyber. ThetaRay approached some of the largest financial institutions in the world, such as ING and Citi Bank, as well as building distribution channels, such as with PWC, and within one year, had developed significant footprint, closing deals and built offices in both Singapore and the United States.

The company is now perceived one of the fastest growing and most compelling innovators in the big data deep learning world, recognized by industry analysts such as Gartner as a Cool Vendor in Security for Technology and Service Providers, GE as Most Innovative Industrial Internet Technology and Frost & Sullivan as Entrepreneurial Company of the Year.



Creating Companies: Sourcing from the Ecosystem