Tara AI closes $10 million in Series A Funding to help companies speed up software development with machine learning

The slow, antiquated and completely manual product development process is causing enterprises to lose an average of $66B annually through inefficiencies in project scoping. Enter Tara AI, a product management platform that uses machine learning to predict the technical tasks, engineering resources and timelines needed for new software projects. Tara AI is revolutionizing the way in which organizations build and deliver software.

Enterprises today are sitting on valuable data in their project management systems, git version control and workforce directories. Tara AI connects to this data and using machine learning models, predicts how to best build the software (technical tasks), how long projects should take (timeline) and who should execute (resources).

Today, Tara AI announced it has secured $10 million in Series A funding to fuel both customer and team growth. The round, which brings the  total funding to date to $13 million, was led by Aspect Ventures, with participation from Slack Fund. Existing seed investors Y Combinator and Moment Ventures also participated in the round. The company plans to triple headcount in 2019, focusing primarily on securing engineering talent to complement its founding team, which consists of former Google and Apple engineers.

Founded in 2015 by Iba Masood and Syed Ahmed, the San Jose and San Francisco-based Tara is the intelligent product builder, managing software builds from start to finish. Its platform leverages machine learning to help teams scope, resource and build cutting-edge software products. Deploy on-demand developers, automatically scope your project and build task lists all through one platform. TARA serves small businesses and enterprise companies nationwide.

Today’s enterprise organizations are constantly searching for ways to optimize the software development lifecycle. Platforms and tools to support this lifecycle are hyper focused on all the aspects of planning projects but fail to address how to execute on them. How do I build my software? With who? And where? Tara AI leverages machine learning to help enterprise organizations scope, allocate resources and build cutting-edge software products, enabling product teams to be on-time, on-budget and on-roadmap.

“It’s ironic the very teams delivering the world’s most widely used and innovative software, still don’t have a predictive solution for their own product development life cycle,“ said Iba Masood, co-founder and CEO, Tara AI. “Tara AI is eliminating the status quo of flying blind – which translates into lost time and money – and is creating a new normal where product teams can securely build on best practices and institutional knowledge, enabling them to deliver better software faster.”

Tara AI’s technology simplifies the process of building software by:

• Analyzing millions of open-source software projects from across the web to instantly create development tasks and timelines for product teams
• Enabling users to select the platform and features for their build based on TARA AI’s roadmap suggestions
• Generating a product scope and technical subtasks
• Recommending the best engineering talent – internally and externally – to execute on the build. Tara AI operates a contractor network of over 50K pre-screened developers.
• Using active feedback algorithms to monitor code commits and provide daily project updates

“With 45% of IT projects running over budget and billions lost due to inefficiencies in product scoping and resource allocations, there is a clear market need for what Tara AI offers,” said Lauren Kolodny, Partner, Aspect Ventures. “By leveraging the latest techniques in AI and enabling more meaningful collaboration, Tara AI is creating the industry’s first comprehensive platform for product management.”

“Tara AI is changing the way software products get built, and we’re thrilled to continue working with them,” said YC Partner Aaron Harris. “98.6% of the workforce is non-technical, including most project managers who are expected to make key estimations on crucial software projects. Tara AI helps teams scope their product builds, and in the process, is creating an entirely new category.”

Tara AI’s enterprise customers include Cisco, Orange Silicon Valley and Mower Digital. To date, its AI technology has ingested millions of data objects from publicly available data, and is growing at a rate of 20%, resulting in increasingly accurate algorithmic results for every project.