Launch HN: Datrics (YC W21) – No-Code Analytics and ML for FinTech
We provide a visual tool to work with structured data by constructing a diagram of data manipulations from lego-like bricks, and then execute it all on a backend. This lets our users accomplish tasks that usually need a team of software engineers, data scientists, and DevOps. For instance, one of our customers is a consumer lending company that developed a new risk model using just our drag-and-drop interface.
I used to lead a large data science consultancy team, being responsible for Financial Services (and Risks specifically). Our teams’ projects included end-to-end risk modeling, demand forecasting, and inventory management optimization, mostly requiring combined efforts from different technical teams and business units to be implemented.
It usually took months of work to turn an idea into a complete solution, going through data snapshot gathering to cleansing to experimenting to working with engineering and DevOps teams to turn experiments in Jupyter notebooks into a complete application that worked in production. Moreover, even if the application and logic behind the scenes were really simple (could be just dozens or hundreds of lines of code for a core part), the process to bring this to end-users could take ages.
We started thinking about possible solutions when a request from one of the Tier 1 banks appeared, which confirmed that we’re not alone in this vision: their problem was giving their “citizen data scientists” and “citizen developers” power to do data-driven work. In other words, work with the data and generate insights useful for business. That was the first time I’d heard the term “citizen data scientist”. Our users are now these citizen data scientists and developers, whom we’re giving the possibility to manipulate data, build apps, pipelines, and ML models with just nominal IT support.
Datrics is designed not only to do ML without coding, but to give analysts and domain experts a drag and drop interface to perform queries, generate reports, and do forecasting in a visual way with nominal IT support. One of our core use cases is doing better credit risk modeling - create application scorecards based on ML or apply rule-based transactional fraud detection. For this use-case, we’ve developed intelligent bricks that allow you to do variables binning and scorecards in a visual way. Other use cases include reports and pivot tables on aggregating sales data from different countries in different formats or doing inventory optimization by forecasting the demand without knowing any programming language.
We’re providing 50+ bricks to construct ETL pipelines and build models. There are some limitations - a finite number of pre-built building blocks that can be included in your app, but if there is no block that you need, you can easily build your own (https://youtu.be/BQNFcZWwUC8).
Datrics is initially cloud-native, but also can be installed on-prem for those customers who have corresponding security policy or setups. The underlying technology, the pipeline execution engine is rather complex and currently built on top of Dask, which gives Python scalability for big datasets. In the next release, we are going to support Pandas as well as to switch intelligently between small datasets for rapid prototyping and big datasets for pipeline deployments.
We’re charging only for private deployments, so our web version is free: https://platform.app.datrics.ai/signup. Try it to create your analytical applications with a machine learning component! We've put together a wiki (https://wiki.datrics.ai) to cover the major functionality,
We are super-excited to hear your thoughts and feedback! We're big believers in the power of Machine Learning and self-service analytics and are happy to discuss what you think of no-code approaches for doing ML and analytics generally as well as the availability of them for non-data scientists. Or anything you want to share in this space!