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Analytics firm Bonza gets seed funding, releases COVID-19 data
The start-up has recently released data on the nationwide COVID-19 reproduction number (Rt) on its website.
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A citizen browses a COVID-19 infection map on a laptop in Jakarta on April 3. (Antara/Puspa Perwitasari)
H
omegrown big data analytics company Bonza has announced that it has received an undisclosed amount of seed funding from East Ventures, one of the most active early-stage venture capital firms in Indonesia.
Bonza will use the funding to develop its technology and expand its business operations. It is currently building a product to simplify data preparation and analyze data.
“Our mission is to support organizations in making sense of their data from various sources, integrate it into a single source of truth and use it to build and deploy AI and machine-learning solutions for better decisions at scale,” said Bonza co-founder Elsa Chandra.
East Ventures co-founder and managing partner Willson Cuaca said the investment would enable Bonza to build a platform that facilitated decision-making and monitored the results of those decisions by presenting insights generated from unstructured data.
“Bonza has adopted an algorithm to estimate the effective reproduction number (Rt) of the COVID-19 virus throughout Indonesia and other countries in the region,” he said, adding that Indonesia needed metrics to monitor the impact of reopening public spaces on the infection rate.
The start-up has recently released data on the nationwide COVID-19 Rt on its website.
Rt is an epidemiological parameter used to measure virus transmission rates. It is often used by policymakers to devise COVID-19 plans and measure the effectiveness of control measures such as large-scale social distancing (PSBB).
For example, if Rt is 2, it indicates that an infected person, on average, will transmit the virus to 2 people. Each patient will then, on average, transmit the virus to two other people and so on.
However, if Rt is less than 1, a carrier will, on average, transmit the virus to less than one person. This suggests the number of infected people in the area will decrease over time until transmission stops.
The Bonza Rt data presents a confidence interval indicating the range of uncertainty in its value of Rt. As the testing ratio increases, the grey area will get smaller, indicating higher levels of confidence.
