Sense Infosys: Mitigating risk through data analytics
By Chong Jinn Xiung June 14, 2018
- Leveraging on AI and machine learning to make sense of big data
- Looking at expansion into Indonesia and Vietnam
WHAT does risk mean to a business? Well, that depends on the nature of the business and how well informed they are of their business environment. However, most businesses are not able to find relevant content and are saddled with using multiple content information silos.
This is the gap that Singapore data analytics startup Sense Infosys hopes to fill by broadening their awareness of their business operating environment through the use of its artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning platform.
Speaking to Digital News Asia on the sidelines of the recently concluded innovfest unbound in Singapore, co-founder and chief technology officer Yong Kai Chin (pic, above) explained that his background lay in working with big data and making sense of public and close data to perform risk assessment while he was a defence engineer in the Singapore military.
A man of action, he was not content in see things from an R&D perspective and wanted to see actual applications of the research. Likewise, his fellow founder Stephen Chow, also from the military, was an innovative individual who wanted to try new things.
Together they saw an opportunity to use the technology they developed for commercial and government work.
Yong explained how Sense Infosys initially began servicing maritime and oil and gas clients as one of their early investors was in the oil and gas space in Singapore. Two years ago, they pivoted to focus on government and financial services as there was a bigger interest in these areas.
He explained that the company leverages on its Klaver platform that offers intelligence to a spectrum of business applications. It merges and blends data from external and internal sources while organising it to be applied to its AI analytics model to make sense of seemingly unrelated data and derive insights.
“This then allows companies to focus on the risk part as most can’t be bothered with data preparation and management. They just want to focus on interpreting the insights to make better decisions,” he said.
To date, Sense Infosys has worked with several government agencies, helping them identify suspicious companies. They essentially do the investigative work to help flag companies if something is off and allow the government agencies to zoom in and further inspect them.
The company successfully raised S$2 million in Series A funding in 2016, that it used to help further develop its product and operations. The investment was led by Jason VEnture, Cap Vista and the Defence, Science and Technology Agency.
This year, Yong said Sense Infosys will focus on product development and tap on AI in an effort to help its risk solutions. He added that they are looking to grow beyond its Singapore base and into the Asean region, in Indonesia and Vietnam specifically.
“A large part of our product comes from natural language processing where there is a lot of public data. Definitely, in Asean, you need to do more than just English so we need to customise our solution to fit different languages,” he said.
Sharing his thoughts on what is next on the horizon for data analytics, he believes that there will be efforts to refine AI models to be more effective with small amounts of data instead of relying on big data sets.
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