This founder set up an AI start-up out of her own pocket and is now making millions in sales

Bianca Anghelina has developed an app that allows people without programming experience to use artificial intelligence and now employs 100 people. This is her path.

Bianca Anghelina's great role model wore a black turtleneck sweater and tigered across the stages of the USA with this one sentence that swept fans off their feet: One last thing. Of course, we're not talking about ex-Wirecard boss Markus Braun or Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, but the original in the turtleneck: Steve Jobs. Because Bianca Anghelina has a plan that can be seen as either a form of ambition or hubris. After all, she wants to create nothing less than the "Apple of artificial intelligence".

Two years ago, the Romanian-born entrepreneur founded Aily Labs, an AI start-up for supposedly better decisions. Unlike many other AI start-ups, founder Anghelina advertises the fact that the start-up's algorithms can be easily integrated into a company's own structure and that the app can also be used by employees who have no idea about programming, let alone artificial intelligence. "Hence the Apple of artificial intelligence: we are opening up a new technology to the masses by making it easy to use," says Anghelina. But can this really work?

There is no shortage of pitfalls with AI applications

According to the Bitkom association, artificial intelligence is widespread in start-ups. Almost one in two companies uses smart algorithms to improve their own performance or that of their customers. At the same time, according to management consultants PwC , just four percent of larger companies use artificial intelligence in their processes - and there are good reasons for this. After all, there is no shortage of pitfalls in the modern application of AI. Firstly, there is the problem of the black box: When an algorithm makes a decision, it is impossible to trace which factors it has included and with what weight, or whether it has wildly thrown together correlations that have nothing to do with the actual question.

Take recruiting, for example: in the past, algorithms have sorted out people with different skin colors because the computer thought that this was the decisive factor for a competent applicant - which is, of course, complete nonsense. Algorithms can also forget to take factors into account when making a customer recommendation, for example, because data is missing or has been fed into the customer's system with (unintentional) bias. And then, of course, there is the problem of employees not using the algorithms because they don't understand all the functions; Excel alone presents many with an almost unsolvable challenge - and that's just a linear program.

Aily Labs now employs 100 people

As the founder of an AI start-up, Bianca Anghelina naturally has eloquent answers to all these challenges, talking about loops in the answers, constant adaptation of the algorithms and her success rate. "Our AI is right in 80 to 95 percent of all use cases," claims the founder. Among other things, it is used in sales, where it is supposed to recognize which customers the employee should approach next, or in the financial sector, where the computer is supposed to predict financial bottlenecks. Large companies with 5,000 employees or more are the most frequent customers of the company, which has its origins in the pharmaceutical industry, thanks to Anghelina's past. Anghelina started her career in the traditional corporate world, where she quickly rose through the ranks to become Head of Digital Finance at pharmaceutical giant Novartis. In 2020, she founded Aily Labs, which she has so far set up without external financing and which she says is profitable, has a turnover in the high single-digit millions and employs around 100 people, most of whom are data analysts.

Anghelina attributes her recipe for success back to Apple and Steve Jobs: if you want to sell artificial intelligence, you have to make it beautiful and easy to use, she explains. At Aily Labs, employees in client companies are therefore not provided with complex tools, Excel spreadsheets and the like, but rather a colorful app in which they only see the results and a recommendation for action on tasks. Anghelina attributes the fact that large companies in particular are engaging the start-up to the agility of her young company. Her start-up is inherently faster than the in-house data team with which it often cooperates. Angehlina and her team are then paid in a classic software-as-a-service model, in which they receive a fee per user, plus a one-off fee for setting up the program in the company.

Previously financed out of her own pocket, Anghelina now wants to look for a strategic investor to drive the growth of Aily Labs forward. There have already been talks, but no concrete commitments yet, she says. An AI could work out when this will happen.