Singaporean AI startup Nugit raises 5.2M from Sequoia India

Singapore-based Nugit promises analysts 50-80% less time spent "extracting, cleaning and combining" data when using its artificial intelligence-enhanced reports The Singapore-based Nugit (a play on "nuggets," of data) announced on Thursday that it raised 5.2 million from Sequoia India, with the goal of doubling its staff and expanding its client base in the near future for a market that will be worth over 185 billion in 2017. This is their first public round of financing, though they raised an undisclosed seed round in March 2015. Nugit's core services center around its work in "natural language generation" (NLG), an artificial intelligence process first developed in the 1990s to automate weather forecasts. NLG works differently from other types of machine learning linguistics because, "NLG systems start with a set of ideas locked in data and turn them into into language that, in turn, communicates them." The goal of this interactive information access is to draw out trends and patterns for reports quickly and clearly, using preprogrammed conditional prompts to review large data sets. Marketing and advertising companies, for instance, want to collect data that can compare data on campaign spending, sales, and reach.