Emirati AI Startup, Tara.ai, Raises $10 Million A Series Fund To Improve The Platform

Based on machine learning, Tara.ai has just secured $10 million from the American Aspect Ventures, Slack, Y Combinator and Moment Ventures, in order to develop the platform and upgrade it. The AI company helps organisations accomplish engineering projects, by specifying the work needed to be done in the project, recommending qualified people to do the job and monitoring the whole process.

Founded by two graduates of the American University in Sharjah, Iba Masood and Syed Ahmed, Tara.ai helps solve poor planning and lack of talents within the engineering projects.

Tara.ai's initial focus was using an AI platform for organisations to evaluate and help source engineering talent, but later Masood and Ahmed who were graduates from American University in Sharjah in the UAE, had problems getting hired after moving to Boston.

The idea for change came after a study conducted by McKinsey, where Masood was an employee once, which showed that 5,000 projects found that $66 billion dollars were identified as “lost” due to projects running past the expected completion time, lack of adequate talent and just overall poor planning.

“We realised that recruiting was actually the final decision you make, not the first, and we wanted to be involved earlier in the decision-making process,” says Masood. “We saw a much bigger opportunity looking not at the people, but the whole project.” Therefore, Tara.ai started the process of identifying the problem and the goal that needs to be accomplished, while suggesting which framework should be followed as well as a timeline that is suitable. After that comes selection of talent internally and later externally if needed. Masood described Tara.ai as a virtual project manager.

A hefty 75% of Tara.ai’s users — customers include Cisco, Orange Silicon Valley and Mower Digital — are “not technical;” they themselves do not ship or use code. “This helps them understand what could be considered and the dependencies that can be expected out of a project,” she notes.

Tara.ai is looking to become more powerful in the future by integrating databases of external consultants and figuring out how to combine it with internal teams and adding bug prediction.