Brandon Boynton first burst onto the Indy tech scene as a Mira Award nominated high school student scaling his anti-bullying platform company. Entrepreneur magazine profiled the then 17-year-old and his app and Brandon’s eyes were opened to the possibilities of a career in tech as well as to the supportive, encouraging nature of the Indianapolis tech community.

Now, a few years older, Brandon has partnered with fellow IUPUI student Zachary Balda and Purdue student Zachary Walters to create Vemity, an artificial intelligence as a platform company that helps software developers incorporate artificial intelligence into their existing software.

Since the whirlwind of being one of the youngest-ever Mira Award nominees in 2015, Brandon has spent a great deal of time in the AI and deep learning world, and he’s certain the new platform will make it easier and faster for others to benefit from what he’s learned.

“Our platform is built so that developers can teach themselves, but we want to make sure Indianapolis businesses receive hands-on help as they begin with AI,” Brandon said. “This would be at no additional cost to the business. Vemity is intended to aid businesses by allowing them to easily incorporate AI into their existing products, thereby creating new revenue streams and increasing their competitiveness in their respective markets.”

Vemity co-founder Brandon Boynton presents the artificial-intelligence-as-a-service platform during a pitch event at The Speak Easy in Indianapolis.

Based on feedback from businesses Vemity has approached so far, including developer interviews, and beta testers, it seems that the primary application for the artificial-intelligence-as-a-service platform will be deep learning on non-media datasets. Vemity does offer image classification and they are working on audio, but the platform’s primary focus has been raw data, as that is where they have seen the majority of interest from the community.

Brandon said examples of how Vemity’s AI platform would be used include as a recommender system, a behavior predictor, and a data-value machine. He said that by using Vemity, developers can experiment with their own data before expanding a strategy to full scale, they can automate processes, or they can bring entire processes in-house saving time and money.

Vemity got started when Brandon and Zachary utilized skills acquired from both their university and private studies to build advanced machine learning systems. The two were looking to found a startup by applying a single machine learning algorithm to make a small task easier or more efficient. They built countless AIs with different use cases, searching for just the right one to start a business. Throughout this search, the two founders began to develop a systematic model for setting up all of their AIs more efficiently.

It wasn’t long before the founders came to the realization that they had accidently produced an effective system for training machine learning algorithms for specific use cases. It worked well for the founders, so why couldn’t this system be made better and be made publicly available? They teamed up with third co-founder, Zachary Walters, to help scale the system. The three asked themselves, “Why build one specific AI when you could empower other developers to build and use their own AIs?”

Vemity was built with this in mind. The premise is that any developer, whether educated through a university or trained in a two week bootcamp, should be able to utilize artificial intelligence in their software. This extends to businesses and tech startups as well. To stay competitive, businesses need to begin adopting AI. According to Brandon, even most investors already acknowledge this and anticipate machine learning to be incorporated into their investments.

Using Vemity, a business can easily leverage the knowledge of their existing developers to integrate AI into their products. Most all software can be made better through machine learning. Whether hoping to predict what customers will do next, analyzing collected data, making extrapolations, or a number of other tasks, the Vemity platform can make this possible at a fraction of the cost of staffing up. Once the AI model is proven, then developers could embark on the more advanced levels of data science.

As Vemity grows, their team is excited to work directly with businesses to discover how AI can best be used to stay competitive and maximize revenue. In their initial launch, Vemity is hoping to work one-on-one with many Indianapolis companies to ensure the platform offers the return on investment businesses are expecting.

“At Vemity, we are passionate about extending the practicality of Artificial Intelligence. Every developer and business should have access to AI, not just research groups and mega-corporations. Our mission is to make AI practical, accessible and available to everyone,” Boynton said.

Developers and businesses can start using the platform for free by visiting Vemity.com. Tutorials are available on the platform to help users get started. For additional support and one-on-one consultations, a support form is available on the website.