Hyper Anna, a Sydney-based start-up which describes itself as an AI powered data analyst – “Siri for analytics” – has secured $1.25 million in venture capital funding from Westpac’s venture capital arm, Reinventure, and AirTree Ventures.

The AI product is claimed to allow users to explore data by asking natural language questions using voice, text, or e-mail. The company says its tool can be used to review existing data collections and to provide predictive insights without the need for a data scientist.

Hyper Anna was founded by three data scientists – Natalie Nguyen, Sam Zheng, and Kent Tian – who say they have developed a machine intelligence layer running on Microsoft Azure which allows interaction with any collection of data.