Bonza big data startup officially launched after announcing the seed funding from East Ventures with undisclosed value. The fresh money will be used to develop technology and products, and support the company’s expansion.
This startup was founded by Elsa Chandra and Philip Thomas. The two met while working at Traveloka. Elsa manages Traveloka’s investment, while Philip leads one of the data science teams tasked with implementing the big data model for product development and improvement.
Bonza’s Co-Founder Elsa Chandra said the startup was built out of a belief that there was a significant gap between leading-edge research of machine learning and AI and its implementation in the field. The company can be a bridge to close the gap.
“Our mission is to help companies translate the data they have from various sources, both structured and not, integrate the data, then use artificial intelligence and machine learning solutions to help them make decisions at an optimal scale,” he explained in an official statement yesterday ( 5/26).
Bonza,’s solution, he continued, can be used for everyone in the company, from data analysts who need products to simplify data processing, company leaders, and frontlines in need of data to make decisions.
In addition, the company is claimed to be able to improve data quality and integrate data from various sources into a single source of truth. This ensures there is no anticardiographic information barrier and provides management with a 360-degree view of all company data. “This solution is not provided by most data analysis companies.”
East Ventures’ Co-Founder & Managing Partner Willson Cuaca added, the team has captured Bonza because there were problems that occurred within the company. Decision making and calculating the impact based on different sources of unstructured and not sequential information is very difficult. This is a challenge in every industry sector.
“Through this investment, Bonza is expected to be able to build a platform that facilitates decision making and monitors the results of these decisions by presenting insights, which result from processing unstructured data,” he said.
Yesterday (5/26) another big data startup, Delman, has announced funding of 23.6 billion Rupiah from Intudo Ventures, Prasetia Dwidharma, and Qlue. The company offers similar service, trying to provide convenience to various groups in implementing big data.
Monitoring the spread of Covid-19
Bonza also uses big data to monitor the rate of Covid-19 infection. They introduced and adapted the Effective Production Number (Rt) model to monitor the spread of Covid-19 in each region. Rt is an epidemiological parameter used to measure the rate of growth of virus transmission.
This model shows the infection rate in each province moving with varying speed and trends. The following insights can be a reference for policymakers to plan strategies and measure the effectiveness of Covid-19 pandemic control measures such as large-scale social restrictions (PSBB).
Elsa said the number of cases and deaths, which had been reported so far, did not adequately reflect the level of actual spread of Covid-19 because it did not calculate daily fluctuations due to changes in a test capacity, differences in social policy restrictions between regions, and variations in community behavior.
Bonza updates Rt Data in every province in Indonesia on a daily basis and the dashboard is free to access.
“The government is reportedly planning to open several economic sectors by June. Indonesia needs data as a reference for the decision made on the spread rate of the Covid-19 virus in the country. It is expected that the dashboard can provide additional information and act as a comparison,” Willson said.
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Original article is in Indonesian, translated by Kristin Siagian