What do 3M, the US Air Force, AstraZeneca and Shell have in common? They have all developed and operated AI using C3, a suite of AI tools for enterprises. Building AI solutions for enterprises has been a successful bet judging by its financial results. “This unicorn is worth $3.3 billion and has nine-figure revenue, it must have come up with something that works,” Techcrunch noted last week. Now C3 is going public, and aims to raise $100-million in its IPO that is expected by the end of the year.
C3 says a central part of its value proposition to enterprise customers is that the C3 AI Site is ‘flexible, easily upgraded, and can be ported across different cloud platforms with little or no modification, providing a solution that future-proofs customers’ investment in enterprise AI and IoT application development.’ C3 AI can be implemented at scale and requires minimal effort and resources compared to other AI approaches.
According to CNBC, C3ai’s software is highly sophisticated and can provide insight and “can read massive amounts of data and tell its owners — companies in industries such as aerospace, financial services, health care, retail and utilities — if something is about to break down, or the most efficient ways to use sensor data in their supply chain management.” The company is also doing its part for social good. It has set up the C3.ai Digital Transformation Institute in partnership with MIT, The University of California, Princeton, Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon to solve systemic social problems by using AI. First on the list of concerns to be tackled, is the novel coronavirus. The group has committed to spending $367 million over five years to find solutions to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The company has secured the ticker symbol ‘AI’ and intends to list on the New York Stock Exchange. The enterprise AI market is expected to grow considerably in the next two years. It was valued at $845m in 2017 and is projected to increase to over $6-billion by 2022. “The rising demand for AI-based solutions and platforms, and the need to analyze large and complex data sets are expected to drive the growth of the enterprise AI market,” writes Markets and Markets in their research report.
From that perspective, the timing for C3 couldn’t be better. It was created by technology entrepreneur Tom Siebel in 2009, to serve a market he estimates will reach $271 billion by 2024. “Assessing the IT landscape at the beginning of the 21st century, it became apparent that a new set of technologies was destined to constitute another step function that would change everything about the information processing world, dramatically accelerating the growth of IT markets,” writes Siebel in C3’s S1 document. “This step function of technologies – substantially more impactful than anything we had seen before – included: elastic cloud computing, big data, the internet of things, and AI or predictive analytics. Today, at the confluence of these technology vectors we find the phenomenon of Enterprise AI and Digital Transformation, mandates that are rising to the top of every CEO’s agenda. The global IT market exceeds $2.3 trillion today.”
C3 notes it has a first mover advantage in the space, and has invested significantly in products and technology over the past decade. Its target customer market includes large enterprises, small and medium businesses and government entities that want to integrate AI into their organizations. The company currently has a relatively small sales team which can be expanded in due course to optimize is revenue potential. “We believe we enjoy a significant first-mover advantage in Enterprise AI, based on our significant investment in our products and technology over the last decade of development,” the S1 reads. “We are not aware of others who have made as much progress as we have in this space. We believe that we have the world’s most extensive Enterprise AI production footprint. Our goal is to establish and maintain a global leadership position in Enterprise AI across all market segments including large enterprises, small and medium businesses, and government entities.”
Artificial Intelligence is being implemented in industries all over the world and is a central theme of the research undertaken at UCIPT. Our work in the HOPE study is using data to assess and shift behavioral outcomes among HIV and other populations.