PacketAI, a French deeptech startup – with 2019 EIT Digital Doctoral School Graduate Abdelhadi Azzouni as one of its two founders – has closed its first funding round, raising 2.1 million euros. The round attracted investors such as Aster Capital, BNP Paribas Development, Entrepreneur First and SGPA.
PacketAI provides an Information Technology Operations (ITOps) solution promising best-in-class service to users while improving the bottom line. It delivers this by using a combination of supervised and unsupervised learning techniques.
“Our focus now is on finalising the product for a first public release in early 2020. We will use the funds to hire a tech team including machine learning engineers, machine learning researchers and web developers,” says Abdelhadi Azzouni, who works as the PacketAI CTO.
Deeptech for business from the EIT Digital PhD
The EIT Digital Industrial Doctoral School is shaping a new generation of tomorrow’s leaders in digital technologies, with strong research and business skills.
Thanks to this approach, PacketAI has been able to obtain a collection of deeptech machine learning algorithms to optimise and automate IT operations from Abdelhadi Azzouni’s PhD thesis work. The topic of his doctoral thesis at Sorbonne was Smart and Secure Network Virtualisation – using machine learning to optimise networks at large scale.
The PacketAI algorithms analyse large amounts of data and aggregate grouped event alerts to execute correlation algorithms to accurately predict incidents. Once the incident is predicted, Artificial Intelligence (AI) guides the engineers to the cause of the problem and reduces the average repair time (MTTR) by up to 50%.
"I personally share the frustration of engineers who have to perform repetitive tasks and who must always struggle to resolve service incidents as quickly as possible. We want to release them from this burden so they can focus on innovation rather than incident resolution," he explains.
Entrepreneurship is one of the most effective ways to impact the world
“I always wanted to build a company, as I believe entrepreneurship is one of the most effective ways to make a tangible impact on the world. The EIT Digital Industrial Doctoral School has helped – and helps – me in many ways in meeting this ambition. Especially the business training during my PhD studies and the business development experience provided me with great resources to bootstrap my company,” he says.
PacketAI, based in Paris, is currently piloting projects with several large French companies.
“Our plan is to serve customers throughout France, Europe then scale up and expand beyond. In five years, I expect us to be serving customers in five continents,” Abdelhadi Azzouni envisions.
