kxen

About kxen

KXEN, whose name stood for Knowledge eXtraction ENgines, was a predictive analytics software provider founded in 1998 by Roger Haddad and Michel Bera. The company was established based on an original idea from Léon Bottou that utilized Dr. Vladimir Vapnik's structural risk minimization (SRM) theory. Headquartered in San Francisco, with additional offices in Paris and London, KXEN carved a niche for itself by developing tools that automated complex data modeling tasks. This approach made predictive analytics more accessible to business users and analysts, not just data scientists.

The company's business model revolved around licensing its proprietary software, primarily its flagship product, InfiniteInsight™. This predictive modeling suite was designed to analyze large datasets and deliver actionable insights for enterprise clients. It offered functions for classification, regression, segmentation, time series analysis, and social network analysis. A key differentiator was its ability to automate the end-to-end modeling process, which significantly increased the speed and agility of deploying predictive models. This automation allowed users to generate and refine multiple models without needing to manually select algorithms or variables, a feature that was particularly beneficial for customer lifecycle optimization—including acquisition, cross-sell, retention, and fraud detection. The software could be deployed on-premise or in the cloud and could output model code in various formats like SQL or PMML for integration into different business environments.

KXEN served data-intensive industries such as financial services, telecommunications, retail, and manufacturing, securing over 400 deployments with major corporations like Bank of America, Barclays, Lowe's, and Vodafone. The company raised a total of $25.2 million over three funding rounds, with its final Series D round in June 2010 raising $8 million. The significant milestone in KXEN's history was its acquisition by SAP SE, which was announced in September 2013 and closed in October of the same year. SAP acquired KXEN to integrate its automated predictive analytics capabilities into its own portfolio, particularly with the SAP HANA in-memory platform and other enterprise applications, aiming to make predictive tools more widespread among business users. Following the acquisition, KXEN's technology was rebranded and incorporated into SAP's offerings, such as SAP Predictive Analytics and SAP InfiniteInsight.