Here's the pitch deck a Stanford professor used to raise $52.5 million from top VCs for his AI startup Sisu, which was named by his mom

• Sisu is a new cloud startup whose platform uses AI to help businesses draw even more advanced insights from the massive amounts of data they are storing in the cloud.
• Sisu just came out of stealth mode this week and announced that it has secured $52.5 Series B funding from NEA and Andreessen Horowitz, which led the company's initial round when it launched last year. Sisu has raised a total of $66.7 million in funding.
• CEO and founder Peter Bailis, a computer science professor at Stanford, said he got the startup's name from his mother, whose parents are from Finland. In Finnish, "sisu"means "grit" which she said was what the work Bailis was doing required.'
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Peter Bailis, the CEO and founder of Sisu, said he got the startup's name from his mother, whose parents came from Finland.

Sisu started as a research project at Stanford, where Bailis is a computer science professor. His goal was to figure out "how do we make machine learning, not just more accurate, but also more useful." Sisu is a cloud startup that uses AI to help companies process massive amounts of data to quickly gain useful insights for running a business.

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It's a hefty challenge. In fact, it was when he explained what he was doing to his mom that she said it would take a lot of "sisu" - Finnish for "grit."

"You need a lot of grit to essentially leverage the amounts of data inside an enterprise to put it to work," Bailis, who grew up in Nebraska and got his PhD from UC Berkeley, said. "It's a massive computational challenge. It's also an organizational challenge."

The San Francisco-based company came out of stealth mode this week as it unveiled its data analytics platform for the first time. It also said it has secured a $52.5 million Series B funding from investors that include NEA and Andreessen Horowitz.

Ben Horowitz, cofounder of Andreessen Horowitz, had led the $14.2 million Series A round when the company launched last year. Sisu has raised a total of $66.7 million, and has about 20 employees. Its platform is now used by tech giant Samsung, Upwork, the freelancing platform, and the salad restaurant chain Mixt.

Sisu highlights the trend of cloud startups building tools that help businesses process and make more use of massive amounts of data they are storing in the cloud, usually on data warehousing platforms such as Snowflake, Amazon Redshift and Google BigQuery.

Bailis said Sisu is looking to offer more sophisticated tools to help businesses manage a constantly increasing amount of data.

"Data has gotten more complex and its arriving all the time," Bailis told Business Insider. "It's constantly coming in."

He called the information "context-rich data" based on a growing number of data points that could be used for analyzing a business.

"You hear about the doubling of data volume every two years," he said. " It's not like people are making twice as many purchases or buying twice as many coffees. But each piece of data is being accompanied by more and more context."

For example, data about a customer who purchases an item, may include other pieces of information: where the purchase was made, what marketing campaign the customer was exposed to, what model of an item was purchased.

"We think there's an opportunity for a new type of analytics, a true diagnostic layer," Bailis said. "It's like having a trusted advisor telling you what's going on in your business and help you understand what to do about it."

Here's the pitch deck Bailis used to secure Sisu's latest funding: