Affinio Makes the Pitch at Microsoft’s Seattle Demo Day

By: 6th June 2016 Portfolio

On Thursday, June 2, Affinio – one of our portfolio companies – presented at the Microsoft Accelerator’s Machine Learning Demo Day in Seattle, Washington.

It was the culmination of a pretty exciting four months for the company. Back in February Affinio was selected to join the third Microsoft Seattle Accelerator, winning out against hundreds of companies applying from over 50 countries. In discussing this cohort’s special focus on cognitive technologies, Microsoft cited a Deloitte study that found over $1 Billion in venture capital has been invested in machine learning and data science in the last two years alone.

During their time in Seattle, Affinio has had the opportunity to access some incredible mentorship, speak with experts, and source new business opportunities. They’ve also had the benefit of having full access to Microsoft’s cloud computing platform, Azure.

In an entry on the company’s blog, Affinio co-founder and CTO Stephen Hankinson described how Azure has helped Affinio to refine their product.

“Being able to leverage the power of Microsoft Azure ML lets us pull in massive amounts of 1st and 3rd party data signals. These capabilities have allowed us to integrate a whole new set of insights into our platform, otherwise unaccessible, including topic profiling, music, images, and video analysis.”

VP Engineering Phil Renaud praised the opportunity the accelerator gave them to work with the best developers out there in an environment that is optimized for startup development.

This past Thursday, CEO Tim Burke took to the stage of Seattle’s Showbox SoDo to deliver a 6.5-minute pitch during which he explained how Affinio allows companies to immerse themselves in their followers’ culture, helping them to create content that “connects and empowers.”

Watch Affinio’s full pitch here:

With Affinio’s SaaS revenues growing by 15% month-over-month, and now boasting over 50 client businesses worldwide, the company is moving from strength to strength, with Gartner having named them one of their 2016 “Cool Vendors” in the Data-Driven Marketing category.

Here at Build, we can’t wait to see where Affinio goes next.