2021 at Unit8 seen by Marcin

Our mission at Unit8 is to help non-digital native companies reach new heights with the help of Data, Analytics, and AI. 2021 has been eventful and as we accelerate more and more into the new year, I believe that looking back at what has been done last year helps me as a CEO to shape the next steps. I can feel only proud of what we achieved, as a team, and want to share some of the highlights with you. I would also like to extend a thank you message to our customers, partners, and our team members – as none of the below could have been made without you. Kudos!

What happened at Unit8 in 2021:

• We are constantly scaling our impact to ensure we deliver on our mission. We started a collaboration with a number of exciting companies and partners. A notable public example is our partnership with Merck where we are building, together with the client, a group-wide analytics platform.
• It was a very diverse year from the project delivery perspective – we completed 30+ high-impact projects that bring our clients tangible business value, from big pharma, chemicals, through banks, insurance, to automotive and energy sectors.
• An impact is not made in a bubble – in order to provide end-to-end solutions for our customers – we partner with the world’s best technology companies – we achieved a triple Gold Partner status with Microsoft and we’ve made progress on our relationship with AWS
• Darts, our open source library for forecasting, got a lot of traction, surpassing in popularity similar tools proposed by internet giants, and we are proud to see that it is increasingly used by some of the largest global and Swiss brands. New to Darts? Check out this recent talk.
• We believe in giving back to the community and hence we kept engaging on a pro bono basis on several fronts – we continued our engagements with WWF, with Digital Switzerland and delivered 2252 volunteering hours
• Finally, our team grew by 40 excellent team members, specializing in data, analytics, and AI. I’m very proud to see how our culture grows with us, despite quite a challenging environment at times
• Despite the pandemic, we managed to bring the team together on many occasions and events (all obviously compliant :)), including our all-hands-on-board offsite we had in Munich last summer

What we shared back with the community last year:

In 2021 we shared 600 minutes of knowledge in the form of articles or online sessions on analytics, data, and AI. We also contributed to the community by co-organizing and participating in industry events. The main highlights are listed below:

• A panel discussion about Advanced Analytics Trend for 2022 with Swiss Re, Credit Suisse, and Merck
• We joined forces with WWF to predict wildfires with Machine Learning
• We spent 2252 hours on pro bono activities for WWF, Powercoders, Aeris Futuro, and more
• Marcin becoming a DigitalSwitzerland’s AI & Data Insights Expert, committed to sharing knowledge
• Darts reached 3.6K+ stars on Github, has been downloaded more than 200K times, and is highly shared in the community
• We published 12 articles, organized 9 webinars, and delivered 6 workshops with our partner Microsoft Azure
• We presented our learnings on various AI events like Intelligent Health, Swiss Cognitive, and PyData Global

Darts, our open source library for forecasting became an industry top tool:

• As mentioned above, Darts reached 3.6K+ stars on Github
• Our open-source library for time series forecasting is being praised by the community here and here
• We have put out our paper on Darts
• Darts were presented at major tech events like PyData and more

Our top blog articles

• Our article Darts: Time Series Made Easy in Python by Julien Herzen was the most popular with 16K views
• Temporal Convolutional Networks and Forecasting by Francesco Lässig follows
• Training Forecasting Models on Multiple Time Series with Darts by Julien Herzen completes the podium
• And if you want more about forecasting, we also wrote Probabilistic Forecasting in Darts and Time Series Forecasting Using Past and Future External Data with Darts.
• We also shared the methodologies used for our work with WWF with AI for good — Unit8 for WWF pt. 1 followed by AI for Good — Unit8 for WWF pt. 2
• Still, on the technical side, Bartosz published the blog post: MLOps — When Training The Best Model Is Not Enough.
• We also wrote for business with Data & AI journey – 5 steps to success, The AI Project Selection Guide, Better, Cheaper, Faster: How Artificial Intelligence Is Changing the Way of Discovering New Chemicals, The Impact of AI in Insurance, A Guide to Building a Financial Transaction Anomaly Detector
• But also wrote about people culture with Great people make amazing teams, and vice versa

Our top webinars

• You were 702 to assist our Unit8 Talks, webinar series on business and technology, in 2021 and we hope that you enjoyed the sessions
• The most popular session was our Advanced Analytics Trends for 2022, a panel discussion with experts from Merck, Swiss Re, and Credit Suisse.
• One the second place, we have our Unit8 Talks #10 Increasing development speed of high-quality ML solutions with MLOps
• We also discussed technology during Unit8 Talks #12 – Six Considerations when designing a Data Science Platform, Unit8 Talks #15 – Machine Learning with few labels, and Unit8 Talks #16 – Forecasting: Use time series forecasting in your company
• For the business audience, we also presented Unit8 Talks #11 AI in Chemistry revolutionalising creation to manufacturing process, Unit8 Talks #13 – Fraud detection & prevention within financial services, and Unit8 Talks #14 – How to get started on your data & AI journey – 5 steps to success
• Our Unit8 Insights newsletter was launched and you can subscribe to it by filling the pop-up that appears after spending 10 seconds on our website or writing to us at marketing@unit8.com

Our first Unit8 branding film

For the occasion of our 4th birthday, we created a branding film to show you more about the people behind Unit8’s mission.

We have different ways, different backgrounds, different stories but the direction is the same.

Together, we can make an impact. We are united.

• Our Unit8 first branding film reached more than 3K+ views on social media
• We also launched our short video series Unit8 Impacts where we showcase amazing projects we have been working on

Conclusion:

We look at 2022 with a lot of optimism and good energy. Our aspiration is to continue to accelerate our customers’ data and AI journeys and help them transform data into value. To do that we plan to grow further (and faster!).

While we’re expanding our footprint in our existing offices in Lausanne, Zurich (Switzerland), and Krakow (Poland) – we also decided to accelerate the talent growth with our soon-to-be-opened 4th office – the beautiful city of Wroclaw, Poland.

We will continue to engage with the community and share our passion – in Q1 we have planned two hackathons and we will be helping in organizing the EPFL’s AMLD, one of the biggest machine learning events in Europe.

New exciting partnerships are in preparation and we hope you will stay with us as many more cool things are coming!

Do you like what you read? Contact me for data advisory or consult our careers to join us.