Alex Dalyac took Geoffrey Hinton's neural network course on Coursera about six months before deep learning went mainstream. He studied computer science at Imperial College London. Entrepreneur First rejected him first for lacking technical knowledge. He reapplied and was accepted.
At an Entrepreneur First hackathon he met Razvan Ranca and they coded through the night. They founded Tractable in 2014. The first paying customer used the software to inspect plastic pipe welds and left around the first funding round. Investors thought that market too small.
The team tried utilities, geology and medical imaging. Adrien Cohen, who co-founded Lazada, joined in 2015. Tractable settled on using computer vision to appraise car and property damage for insurers, trained on millions of accident and repair images.
In 2020 it won the Best Technology Award at the British Insurance Awards. In June 2021 a round valued it at $1bn, and it had more than 300 staff. SoftBank Vision Fund 2 put in $65m in July 2023. Rivals include CCC Intelligent Solutions, Mitchell and Solera.