Alteryx, Inc., revolutionizing business through data science and analytics, announced that it has acquired Feature Labs, a data science software company launched out of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) that automates feature engineering for machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) applications.

The acquisition of Feature Labs will further enable Alteryx to help organizations empower every data worker to fill the data science and machine learning talent gap. Alteryx puts insights from advanced analytics and machine learning-once only available to statisticians and quants-into the hands of more data workers across the enterprise. "Gartner predicts that, by 2020, more than 40% of data science tasks will be automated, resulting in increased productivity and broader use by citizen data scientists." 

"Feature Labs' vision to help both data scientists and business analysts easily gain insight and understand the factors driving their business matches the Alteryx DNA. Together, we are helping customers address the skills gap by putting more powerful advanced analytic capabilities directly into the hands of those responsible for making faster decisions and accelerating results. We are excited to welcome the Feature Labs team and to add an engineering hub in Boston," said Dean Stoecker, co-founder and CEO of Alteryx.

Feature Labs' feature engineering capabilities, combined with the ease of use of the Alteryx Platform, creates an environment that further accelerates time-to-insight and time-to-value for analysts and data scientists alike. As part of their research at MIT's Computer Science and AI Lab, Feature Labs co-founders, Max Kanter and Kalyan Veeramachaneni, developed an innovative set of algorithms to optimize the manual, time-consuming and error-prone process required to build machine learning models. In addition to automating the model fitting and hyper-parameter tuning process, Feature Labs' differentiated platform automates the feature engineering and data prep process, resulting in significant increases in model accuracy and overall process efficiency.

"Alteryx maintains its leadership in the market by continuing to evolve its best-in-class, code-free and code-friendly platform to anticipate and meet the demands of the 54 million data workers worldwide. The addition of our unique capabilities empowers more businesses to build machine learning algorithms faster and operationalize data science," said Max Kanter, co-founder and CEO of Feature Labs. "Feature engineering is often a time-consuming and manual process and we help companies automate this process and deploy impactful machine learning models." Kanter has also held engineering roles at Twitter, The New York Times, Fitbit and Hewlett Packard.

Data scientists around the world leverage Feature Labs open-source libraries with over 350,000 downloads, providing automated feature engineering across nearly every domain. Alteryx plans to continue to support the open-source community to address the exponential demand in machine learning.