Up-and-coming analytics provider Outlier Inc. today announced that it has nabbed a $6.2 million funding round to automate the task of extracting new insights from business data.

The startup is led by Chief Executive Sean Byrnes, who is no stranger to the analytics market. Byrnes previously founded Flutter Inc., a provider of tools for understanding app usage that was acquired by Yahoo! in a deal reportedly worth between $200 million and $300 million.

Outlier aims to introduce a fresh approach to business analytics. The startup’s platform can connect to a wide range of systems, from databases to popular cloud services such as Stripe, and automatically analyze the data inside using artificial intelligence. Outlier delivers the four to five most important items that its algorithms find each day to users in the form of an email brief.

According to the startup, the platform lends itself to a number of different uses. Online retailers, for instance, can plug Outlier into Google Analytics to flag events such as a sudden spike in website traffic from a certain source. A software-as-a-service provider, in turn, might want to keep an eye on how product updates affect user behavior. And Outlier claims that its platform can pinpoint potential business problems as well. 

The startup said that the offering is particularly adept at uncovering new and unknown patterns in data. Since the platform’s AI models extract insights automatically, users don’t have to specify manually in advance what piece of information or result should be retrieved. This automation could theoretically be a major boon given that enterprises find themselves with more data to sift through every year.

Outlier’s investors certainly seem confident about its value proposition. San Francisco-based fund Ridge Ventures led the newly announced round, with 11.2 Capital, First Round Capital, Homebrew, Susa Ventures and SV Angel joining as well. The startup has raised more than $8 million so far.

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