Coinalytics Rebrands As Skry, Hires IBM Vet to Go ‘Blockchain’

Coinalytics today announced it has rebranded as Skry, unveiling a new logo and revealing two new hires as part of its move to expand beyond services for the bitcoin blockchain.

In an interview with CoinDesk, Skry co-founder and CEO Fabio Federici said the company is working to merge blockchain, big data and artificial intelligence in to a single product.

Federici said:

"The company itself wants to move beyond bitcoin, so sending out that clear message was important. But in order to do so, and to make it applicable to any blockchain, we needed that expertise to go from a bitcoin analytics application to a blockchain analytics platform."

Announced today, Dr Akash Singh, IBM’s former chief researcher who worked for 10 years on IBM's Watson computer, joined Skry as its chief technology officer. Singh will focus on helping make Coinalytics "enterprise-ready" by ensuring that big banks and law enforcement agencies interested in its services can leverage a blockchain-agnostic platform.

The move to service larger companies also includes a new "fusion layer" of the analytics product.

Singh, who was also the CTO of data science at Shenzhen, China-based Huawei, will work to build the service designed to let clients safely analyze in-house data like user accounts and geolocation information but without turning it over to any third-party.

Also announced today, Dr Masoud Nikravesh, was hired as Skry's new chief data scientist. Nikravesh is an artificial intelligence researcher and former computational science and engineering director at the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society for the State of California.

Over his 25-year career Nikravesh has specialized in risk analysis and prediction models for credit risk scoring, according to the statement. He also worked on anomaly detection for anti-fraud services.

Nikravesh said in a statement:

"Skry is at the forefront of applying Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence to turn the blockchain into actionable insights, which will have a crucial impact on the future of this technology, beyond bitcoin."

A new path forward

Founded in April 2014, Palo Alto-based Skry has raised a total of $1.3m from 500 Startups and The Hive to build its analytics platform for bitcoin.

But as the firm speaks with law-enforcement agencies and privacy-conscious banks, it has joined the ranks of companies like Elliptic, which last month raised $5m for its own set of blockchain surveillance tools.

In interview with CoinDesk, Federici said he wanted the newly rebranded company to help "bridge the gap" between the rapidly increasing sets of data available through machine-learning tools and the business use-cases that might only become apparent upon close examination.

In a hat-tip to the company’s name, which means to foretell the future using a crystal ball, Federici added:

"We believe in the real-time aspect of the service using machine learning and artificial intelligence to let the user get best possible look at the future."

Skry logo courtesy of Skry; Crystal ball via Shutterstock