For a certain kind of European founder, the dream is a clean exit to a pharmaceutical giant. For Ana Maiques, the dream was to get one to run on her software. At her neurotech startup Neuroelectrics, she spent years convincing clinicians that brain stimulation could be therapeutic. Now at Aily Labs, she is convincing executives that the answer to a billion-dollar supply chain question might be waiting on an employee's phone.
Aily Labs sells an AI-powered decision intelligence platform. The pitch is simple, if ambitious: connect every data silo in a sprawling multinational, from ERP systems to factory sensors, and push personalized, prescriptive insights to the people who need them, in real time. The company calls it a mobile-first app, which is a polite way of saying it wants to kill the executive dashboard. Instead of a manager refreshing a BI tool, Aily's system, built on AWS, surfaces recommendations directly to a supply chain planner or a finance analyst. It is enterprise software that aspires to feel like a consumer product, a layer of intelligence meant to sit on top of a corporation's existing, often messy, data infrastructure.
The bet on the factory floor
The company's foundational case study is Sanofi. The French pharmaceutical giant uses Aily's platform, branded internally as 'Plai', to aggregate over one billion data points across its R&D and supply chain operations [sanofi.com, 2026]. The goal is to predict everything from clinical trial enrollment timelines to the probability of success for a given drug program. For a company that moves physical goods and biological materials across the globe, shaving weeks off a timeline or identifying a bottleneck before it happens translates directly to millions in value, and potentially lives. This is not about sentiment analysis on customer reviews. This is about making the complex, capital-intensive, and regulated machinery of a Fortune 500 company run more smoothly.
Aily's approach is modular. Instead of a monolithic platform, it offers specialized apps,.fin for finance, .r&d for research, .supply for supply chain, and so on [Perplexity Sonar Pro Brief]. This lets functional leaders buy in piecemeal, a classic wedge strategy for enterprise sales. The promise is a 99% predictive accuracy from its library of over 300 models [ailylabs.com]. In the energy world, we talk about the cost of intermittency; in pharma and manufacturing, it's the cost of latency. Aily is betting that the cost of a late decision, made on stale data viewed in a monthly report, is now higher than the cost of installing its real-time nervous system.
A founder built for regulated scale
CEO Ana Maiques cut her teeth in one of the most challenging arenas for a startup: regulated medical devices. As the former CEO of Neuroelectrics, she navigated clinical trials and FDA pathways for non-invasive brain stimulation technology [Perplexity Sonar Pro Brief]. That experience is a relevant credential for selling to the Sanofis of the world, where sales cycles are long, compliance is non-negotiable, and the cost of being wrong is catastrophic. Her profile extends beyond the company; she is president of EsTech, a lobby group for Spanish scale-ups, and a permanent member of the European Innovation Council Advisory Board [techcrunch.com, 2022], [imaginationinaction.co]. This is a founder who understands how to move within large, bureaucratic systems, both corporate and governmental.
The leadership team has been bolstered by heavyweight appointments to its advisory board, including former Novartis CEO Joseph Jimenez and former Eli Lilly CFO Derica Rice [PR Newswire, 2026]. These are not vanity advisors. They are signals to the market, and to potential customers, that Aily is serious about the complexities of global life sciences and manufacturing. The company has also expanded its footprint with a New York office and key commercial hires, indicating a push into the crucial North American market [PR Newswire, April 2024].
The $80 million question
In May 2025, Aily Labs raised an $80 million growth round led by Insight Partners, with participation from Eurazeo and others [PR Newswire, May 2025]. The round was later characterized as a Series B led by FPV Ventures [techfundingnews.com, 2026]. This capital is war-chest territory, the kind reserved for scaling a proven wedge into a broad platform. The investor mix is telling: Insight Partners is known for growth-stage enterprise software, while FPV Ventures brings deep operational experience. The table below outlines the disclosed funding.
| Round | Amount | Lead Investor | Year |
|---|---|---|---|
| Series B / Growth | $80 million | Insight Partners / FPV Ventures | 2025 |
The competitive moat is not the AI models themselves, but the deployment. Anyone can train a model on historical supply chain data. The hard part is integrating it with a legacy SAP instance, getting clean real-time data from a hundred global factories, serving a secure, actionable insight to a manager's phone, and having that manager trust it enough to act. Aily's bet is that its mobile-first, role-based packaging and its deep AWS integration create a deployment advantage that pure-play AI model shops or legacy business intelligence vendors cannot easily match.
Where the wheels could come off
For all its ambition, Aily Labs faces a landscape littered with the wreckage of enterprise 'AI platforms' that promised to be the single pane of glass. The risks are not hypothetical.
- Implementation gravity. The value proposition hinges on connecting disparate data sources. In a global enterprise, that can be a multi-year, eight-figure systems integration project. Aily must prove its platform accelerates this, not just adds another layer of complexity.
- The dashboard is a habit. Convincing employees to change daily workflows from a familiar dashboard to a push-notification-driven app is a change management challenge as much as a technical one. Adoption is the true bottleneck.
- The incumbent response. Players like SAP, Oracle, and Salesforce have entire divisions dedicated to embedding AI into their existing platforms. Their advantage is they already own the customer and the data. Aily must be ten times better to justify the switching cost.
The company's answer, implied in its Sanofi case study, is to start with a high-value, contained use case,like predicting R&D costs,and demonstrate such clear ROI that expansion becomes inevitable. It's the classic land-and-expand, but on a billion-point scale.
The next twelve months
The fresh capital suggests a phase of aggressive expansion. The hiring of a senior customer success manager for pharma and finance in New York is a concrete signal [jobs.insightpartners.com]. The watchpoint is whether Aily can replicate the Sanofi blueprint in another Fortune 500 vertical, like automotive or chemicals, and do so within a typical enterprise sales cycle. Another milestone will be moving beyond predictive insights to demonstrating closed-loop automation,where the system doesn't just recommend an action but executes it, with human oversight.
A back-of-the-envelope calculation is instructive. If Sanofi's 'Plai' system is truly aggregating a billion data points, the energy cost of that compute is not trivial. Training and running hundreds of models at that scale could easily consume several megawatt-hours per day. The climate math only works if the efficiency gains,fewer wasted shipments, optimized production schedules, faster drug trials,save orders of magnitude more carbon than the platform consumes. It's a net-positive equation Aily will need to prove as it scales.
Ultimately, Aily Labs is not just selling an AI tool. It is selling a new decision-making rhythm for the industrial world. Its real competition is not a startup with a better algorithm. It is the monthly operations review meeting, the static spreadsheet, and the entrenched habit of waiting to see what happened last quarter. For a company sitting on an $80 million vote of confidence, that is the incumbent it must beat.
Sources
- [PR Newswire, May 2025] Aily Labs Raises $80 Million to Scale AI that Drives Performance across Fortune 500 Companies | https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/aily-labs-raises-80-million-to-scale-ai-that-drives-performance-across-fortune-500-companies-302607836.html
- [Perplexity Sonar Pro Brief] Aily Labs company overview
- [sanofi.com, 2026] Sanofi case study on Plai AI app | https://www.sanofi.com
- [ailylabs.com] Aily Labs platform details | https://www.ailylabs.com
- [techcrunch.com, 2022] Spanish scale-ups club together as EsTech lobby group | https://techcrunch.com/2022/04/06/estech/
- [PR Newswire, April 2024] Aily Labs Expands Global Footprint with New York Office Launch | https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/aily-labs-expands-global-footprint-with-new-york-office-launch-and-strengthens-leadership-team-with-new-svp-of-sales-and-head-of-marketing-302099999.html
- [techfundingnews.com, 2026] Aily Labs funding report | https://techfundingnews.com
- [jobs.insightpartners.com] Aily Labs Senior Customer Success Manager role | https://jobs.insightpartners.com/companies/aily-labs-2/jobs/44750052-senior-customer-success-manager-pharma-finance-new-york
- [imaginationinaction.co] Profile of Ana Maiques | https://imaginationinaction.co