Putting Powerful Data Analysis and Modeling Capabilities into the Hands of Data Workers Across the Globe
IRVINE, Calif.—Oct. 4, 2019—Alteryx, Inc. (NYSE: AYX), revolutionizing business through data science and analytics, today announced that it has acquired Feature Labs, a data science software company launched out of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) that automates feature engineering for machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) applications.
The acquisition of Feature Labs will further enable Alteryx to help organizations empower every data worker to fill the data science and machine learning talent gap. Alteryx puts insights from advanced analytics and machine learning—once only available to statisticians and quants—into the hands of more data workers across the enterprise. “Gartner predicts that, by 2020, more than 40% of data science tasks will be automated, resulting in increased productivity and broader use by citizen data scientists.” 1
“Feature Labs’ vision to help both data scientists and business analysts easily gain insight and understand the factors driving their business matches the Alteryx DNA. Together, we are helping customers address the skills gap by putting more powerful advanced analytic capabilities directly into the hands of those responsible for making faster decisions and accelerating results. We are excited to welcome the Feature Labs team and to add an engineering hub in Boston,” said Dean Stoecker, co-founder and CEO of Alteryx.
Feature Labs’ feature engineering capabilities, combined with the ease of use of the Alteryx Platform, creates an environment that further accelerates time-to-insight and time-to-value for analysts and data scientists alike. As part of their research at MIT’s Computer Science and AI Lab, Feature Labs co-founders, Max Kanter and Kalyan Veeramachaneni, developed an innovative set of algorithms to optimize the manual, time-consuming and error-prone process required to build machine learning models. In addition to automating the model fitting and hyper-parameter tuning process, Feature Labs’ differentiated platform automates the feature engineering and data prep process, resulting in significant increases in model accuracy and overall process efficiency.
“Alteryx maintains its leadership in the market by continuing to evolve its best-in-class, code-free and code-friendly platform to anticipate and meet the demands of the 54 million data workers worldwide2. With the addition of our unique capabilities, we expect to empower more businesses to build machine learning algorithms faster and operationalize data science,” said Max Kanter, co-founder and CEO of Feature Labs. “Feature engineering is often a time-consuming and manual process and we help companies automate this process and deploy impactful machine learning models.” Kanter has also held engineering roles at Twitter, The New York Times, Fitbit and Hewlett Packard.
Data scientists around the world leverage Feature Labs open-source libraries with over 350,000 downloads, providing automated feature engineering across nearly every domain. Alteryx plans to continue to support the open-source community to address the exponential demand in machine learning. Learn more about the acquisition on the Alteryx Community blog: https://bit.ly/2LKuPIj.
About Alteryx
Revolutionizing business through data science and analytics, Alteryx offers an end-to-end analytics platform that empowers data analysts and scientists alike to break data barriers, deliver insights and experience the thrill of getting to the answer faster. Organizations all over the world rely on Alteryx daily to deliver actionable insights. For more information visit https://www.alteryx.com.
Alteryx is a registered trademark of Alteryx, Inc. All other product and brand names may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners.
Safe Harbor Statement
This press release contains forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties, including statements regarding the acquisition of Feature Labs, its impact on the Alteryx software platform and its customers, and Alteryx plans to support the open-source community, and other future events. These forward-looking statements are only predictions and may differ materially from actual results due to a variety of factors including, but not limited to: our ability to integrate Feature Lab’s employees and operations into our business; the benefits of the acquisition and impact on the software platform and customers of Alteryx; our ability to develop and release product and service enhancements and new products and services to respond to rapid technological change in a timely and cost-effective manner; intense and increasing competition in our market; and other general market, political, economic, and business conditions.
Additional risks and uncertainties that could affect our business are included in the Risk Factors sections of our Annual Report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2018 and Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q for the quarter ended June 30, 2019. All forward-looking statements contained herein are based on information available to us as of the date hereof and we do not assume any obligation to update these statements as a result of new information or future events.
1 Gartner, Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2019, David Cearley, Brian Burke, October 15, 2018
2Alteryx-commissioned IDC Infobrief, The State of Data Science and Analytics, April 2019