Forecast raises $5.5M for its ‘AI-powered’ project management software

Forecast, a Denmark-based startup that has developed "AI-powered" project management software, has raised $5.5 million in new funding.

The round is led by Crane Venture Partners, with participation from existing backers SEED Capital and Heartcore. Forecast has raised $10 million in total funding to date.

Founded in late 2016, Forecast describes itself as an AI-powered project management solution that automates manual project management tasks, and brings extra visibility and predictive capabilities to to project management. The idea is to help increase collaboration across teams with a better workflow and to improve planning.

Forecast claims that by using its project management software, customers reduce their administrative tasks by 20-40% and gain much better insights into "project risk, resource management and more".

"Work is going more project-based" leading to an increased need for project management skills and expertise," Forecast co-founder and CEO Dennis Kayser tells TechCrunch. "Plus, projects are getting more complex. Project management depends on many manual, ongoing updates to stay on time, on budget and on track. That's why 66% of all projects fail due to human error".

In addition, as projects become more complex and the data associated with a project increases exponentially, Kayser says the problem is getting worse, which, of course, is where machine intelligence can help. "We don't learn from our mistakes because no one can keep track of every influencing factor to make crucial adjustments," he adds.

To tackle this, Forecast uses AI to help keep projects on track and make project management more efficient. The software integrates with existing tools - such as Trello, Slack, Gdrive, Githum and Salesforce - and uses these various external data-points as key indicators for how well a project is running.

"[It pulls in] data from disparate systems and synthesizes it into something human-readable with powerful AI," explains Kayser. "Everyone on your team can continue to use the tool they prefer without sacrificing dead-simple scheduling, reporting and collaboration for project managers and senior executives. With better insights and tools, project managers can be more efficient and gain insights from increasingly complex projects".

The use of AI is proactive, too. This includes matching the best person and role to the task, automation of time registration, forecasting the size and duration of tasks, and being alerted before a project is in trouble.

With regards to target customer, Kayser says that Forecast is focused on helping IT & services, marketing, and computer software development companies that "rely on capacity being predictable and project delivery being successful".

Forecast currently has "hundreds of customers" in over 40 countries. The software has helped customers manage more than 40,000 projects with more than 1,000,000 tasks created.