He has shipped code for missile guidance and for iPhone ads. Now he is trying to make machine learning as easy as clicking an icon.
Abe Parangi. The engineer who keeps a designer's eye, and the designer who never stopped writing code.
Ask Abraham Parangi what Akkio is for and he reaches for the history of the personal computer. Once, using a machine meant typing obscure commands into a black terminal. Then someone replaced the commands with clickable icons, and everyone showed up. That, more or less, is the company he is building.
Akkio aims to open the world of artificial intelligence up to a wider market.- Abraham Parangi
Akkio is an AI platform built for people who were never going to learn Python. You connect your data, you ask a question, and the system builds the predictive model or the report for you. No notebooks. No data-science queue. The pitch is blunt: the hard part of AI should be invisible.
In its early life the company sold no-code machine learning to business analysts at large. Over time it sharpened its aim at one industry that lives and dies on data it cannot quite read - media and advertising agencies. Akkio now handles campaign strategy, audience analysis, propensity modeling, media-mix modeling, and performance measurement, and its technology powers Plus.AI, the global media-planning system used by Mediaplus.
In 2023 the team added Generative Reports, a feature that treats a business question the way ChatGPT treats a prompt - you type what you want to know, and the analysis writes itself back to you. It was a tidy expression of the founding idea: meet people where they already are, which is typing in plain English.
People have been working on these tools for many years. Suddenly, the trajectory is going vertical.- Abraham Parangi
Forecasting, propensity scoring, and media-mix modeling without a data team.
Ask a question in plain language. Get a report, not a query language.
Most founders have a tidy origin story. Parangi's reads like a dare. He describes his own path as running from missile-guidance systems to iPhone application ads - which is to say, from the most rule-bound software on earth to the most attention-hungry. Along the way he picked up a habit that defines Akkio: he refused to choose between the engineer and the designer.
He studied Computer Science at Cornell. He wrote software at Raytheon, where mistakes are measured in trajectories. He did a turn at Apple, working on the technology behind iPhone advertising. Then came five years at Markforged, the 3D-printing company, under a title most companies do not have on the org chart: Director of Technology & Creative. Engineering and aesthetics, on one business card. In 2019 he and three co-founders - Jon Reilly, Craig Wisneski, and Ekin Keserer - started Akkio.
Funding rounds led by Bain Capital Ventures. Series A closed August 2023.
Akkio's line is that human expertise makes AI better, not the other way around. The model is the assistant, not the oracle.
Parangi keeps returning to the leap from typed commands to clickable icons - the moment computers stopped being for specialists.
Rather than sell AI to everyone, Akkio narrowed in on media teams drowning in campaign data they can't fully use.
This makes it possible for people who have no knowledge of coding to accomplish all sorts of reasonably complicated tasks - and produce code without the formidable barriers of the past.
Just as Windows and then Mac OS replaced typing obscure DOS commands with clickable icons, Akkio aims to open the world of artificial intelligence up to a wider market.
People have been working on these tools for many years. Suddenly, the trajectory is going vertical.
This investment allows us to scale our platform so business analysts can leverage AI to work faster, unlock new insights, and make a bigger impact.
Defense missile software, then iPhone ad tech, then AI for ad agencies. Few careers swing that far.
At Markforged his role literally combined two jobs: Director of Technology & Creative.
He explains AI's future using the history of the graphical user interface, not a product roadmap.
On X, his bio skips the titles. He calls himself a developer and a hacker.
Akkio is rooted in Cambridge, Massachusetts, deep in the MIT orbit.
The stated goal is AI that amplifies team expertise rather than replacing it. The shorter version is the one Parangi has been telling since the start: take the most powerful technology in the world, and make it feel like clicking an icon.