Any business is essentially a complex web of numbers and statistics, or that’s how passionate practitioners of data analysis view it like Sayandeb Banerjee. He is one of the three cofounders of TheMathCompany – one of the earliest data science startups in India. Along with former MuSigma employees and colleagues Aditya Kumbakonam and Anuj Krishna, TheMathCompany was established in 2016 as an AI/ ML firm that aids organisations in becoming analytically self-sufficient.

Banerjee, who has worked in the analytics domain for over 20 years, believes that what he and his cofounders set out to accomplish was not just a business idea but a passion. “We have seen this space evolve over two decades, and enterprises have reached that critical point of making data driven decisions. This has also led to the maturity of startups like TheMathCompany, which has a more horizontal approach to addressing an enterprise’s data needs.”

(Sayandeb Banerjee, Cofounder, TheMathCompany)

Being industry agnostic, TheMathCompany works with a range of clients in sectors like hospitality, retail, CPG, banking and pharma to name a few. “Our endeavour to provide users with analytics applications, and guide them to make decisions day to day about their business.” The company works with 33 Fortune 500 companies, and made around $10million in estimated revenues as of May 2019. The company has been doubling growth since inception and is poised to continue on this trajectory. The venture has been bootstrapped, but recently raised an undisclosed amount of funds from Arihant Patni of the Patni Computers Family Office.

One of the strongest value offerings is Co.dx, a proprietary end to end analytics platform, which codifies learnings from industry-wide problem statements and trains itself to address similar challenges through the power of machine learning. Co.dx helps develop “contextual assets” or industry-specific inputs based on a company’s business landscape to enable efficient data extraction, feature engineering, algorithm development, performance monitoring and so on. Banerjee explains that turnkey AI tools like forecasting applications, scenario simulators, marketing spend optimisers and dashboard suites are constantly in use by their analysts to help clients make informed decisions.

Named as one of the fastest growing companies according to FastCompany, The Math Company lays great emphasis on building a skilled workforce that can take on the new-age challenges put forth by digital enterprises today. “Hiring from the market pool of talent alone is not sufficient. We seek problem solvers, fast thinkers and people with strong analytical skills primarily. In addition, we have an inhouse learning and development programme called Co.ach, which focuses on experiential learning. We have also collaborated with several universities and colleges for internship opportunities and hiring the right talent for this field.”

As a data science startup, and being one of the earliest ones in the industry, Banerjee is all too aware of the challenge posed by biased and coloured datasets, which could eventually affect the integrity of analytics exercises. “Data becomes biased because of human inputs. One of the ongoing efforts at The Math Company is to constantly check our biases – when we’re rapidly problem solving, we tend not to pay attention to the finer nuances of what the data is telling us. Our team of analysts and data scientists are trained to seek biases within datasets and constantly review them. We have institutional arrangements in place to address bias as well. We recognize that this is a cultural shift, and to be a truly new-age data science company, we need to implement these changes in our DNA.”

Listen to the entire interview here on Conversations with INDIAai here.