This founder launched an AI startup out of her own pocket and is now making millions in revenue

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

Bianca Anghelina's great role model wore a black turtleneck sweater and tramped 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 sweater: Steve Jobs. Because Bianca Anghelina has a plan that must be understood either as 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 Aily founded Aily Labs, an AI start-up for supposedly better decisions. Unlike many other AI start-ups, founder Anghelina advertises 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 previously had 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 that really work?

There is no shortage of pitfalls in AI applications

According to the Bitkom association, artificial intelligence is widespread among startups. Nearly one in two uses clever algorithms to improve their own performance or that of their customers. At the same time, according to the consulting firm PwC , just four percent of larger companies use artificial intelligence in their operations - and there are good reasons for that. After all, there is no shortage of pitfalls in the modern application of AI. First, there's the black box problem: When an algorithm makes a decision, it is impossible to trace which factors it has included and with what weight, or whether it has thrown together wild 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. To that end, algorithms can also forget to include factors when making a customer recommendation, for example, because data is missing or has been fed to customers with (unintentional) bias. And then, of course, there's the problem that employees don't use the algorithms because they don't even understand all the functions; Excel alone presents many with an almost insoluble 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 finance, where the computer is supposed to predict financial bottlenecks. Large companies with 5,000 or more employees are the most frequent customers of the company, which owes its beginnings to Anghelina's past in the pharmaceutical industry. Anghelina started her professional life in the corporate world and quickly rose through the ranks until she finally arrived at pharmaceutical giant Novartis as Head of Digital Finance. Then, in 2020, she founded Aily Labs, which she has so far built up without outside financing and which, by her own account, is profitable, has a turnover in the high single-digit millions and employs around 100 people, most of them data analysts.

Anghelina traces 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. That's why at Aily Labs, employees at customer companies don't get elaborate instruments, Excel spreadsheets and the like, but a colorful app in which they can simply see the results and, at the same time, a trading recommendation for tasks. Anghelina attributes the fact that large companies in particular hire 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, she says. Angehlina and her team are then paid in a classic software-as-a-service model, where they get a fee per user, plus a one-time fee for setting up the program in the company.

Previously funded out of her own pocket, Anghelina now wants to look for a strategic investor to further drive Aily Labs' growth. Talks have already taken place, but no concrete commitments have been made yet, she says. An AI could calculate when the time will come.