Meet the Transform Cohort 2 Startups: Quail.ai

Published on Wednesday, November 15, 2023

Aarthi Koripelly (second from right) and Jackson Lee (far right)

Team Members

Aarthi Koripelly – Cofounder and CEO
Jackson Lee – Cofounder and COO

What does your company do?

Quail.ai is a machine learning toolkit for small and midsize businesses as they transition to the data-driven economy. The toolkit is a plug-and-play solution that minimizes infrastructure investment and integrates with any development pipeline and deployment environment. For the engineer, it is a single user interface that manages the machine learning lifecycle from end to end.

Flexibility and scalability lie at the core of the problem. Today’s solutions are either fully managed, lacking the flexibility of open-source technology, or self-managed, lacking the scalability of managed service. Quail.ai’s solution addresses these pain points by putting the user experience first. The result is accelerated integration for businesses in transition.

Beyond the toolkit, Quail.ai offers value-add services where customer-facing engineers guide organizations in building out use cases as the organizations scale.

How did you get the idea?

Aarthi had been involved in bioinformatics research at the University of Chicago. In this role, she gained exposure to a number of machine learning platforms, from Big Tech to their emerging competitors. Frequently, she ran into the same problem: rather than managing the platform, the platform was managing her. With this experience as inspiration, the idea for the product was born.

Quail.ai is Aarthi’s second act with Jackson, whom she met during the founding of UChicago’s robotics team. The two have decided to work together as they tackle the present challenges facing AI developers. Once a minimal viable product, Quail.ai has become a funded business proposition.

What are you most excited for as part of Transform?

Before our acceptance to Transform, we participated in the College New Venture Challenge, a generalist accelerator for undergraduate entrepreneurs.

Now through Transform, we have a bench of advisors in our corner who are best-in-class, many of whom have scaled early-stage businesses in our category. By virtue of partnerships with Amazon and Google, the breadth of use cases has begun to take shape. We are humbled to have the support of Chicago Booth’s Starr Marcello and Shyama Majumdar who recognize that innovation can come from anywhere.

Following the development of our minimum viable product, we have launched a beta of the product with a representative set of prospective customers. As next steps, we aim to convert these beta users into first customers.

What do you hope to get out of the Transform program?

In the Transform program, product development is our focus as we build out use cases that demonstrate the value of our solution. As we reach prospective customers, we can showcase the breadth of these use cases, including those of highest potential, with the promise of swift implementation through our value-add services.

Looking ahead, we hope to achieve successful market entry. At the same time, the journey has just begun. With prevailing tailwinds and an opportunistic team like ours, all that remains is execution.

Housed within the Polsky Center’s Deep Tech Ventures initiative, Transform provides full-spectrum support for the data science and AI startups accepted into the accelerator, including access to business and technical training, industry mentorship, venture capital connections, and funding opportunities. To learn about the other teams, click the links below.