Stephen Pratt surprised many when he left IBM after working on its vaunted Watson artificial intelligence technology in February, after just eight months on the job.
It turns out that Mr. Pratt has set his sights on starting up his own A.I. business.
Mr. Pratt and the investment firm TPG Growth plan to announce on Monday that they have formed Noodle.ai, which aims to bring a combination of artificial intelligence and data analysis to corporate customers.
It is a field that has grown exceptionally popular in recent years, spurred on in part by the visibility of IBM’s Watson, which famously defeated human “Jeopardy” champions like Ken Jennings. Now, a range of companies like IBM and start-ups believe that A.I. can help companies make sense of their vast amounts of data much more quickly.
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In setting up Noodle, Mr. Pratt is reuniting with TPG, the $70 billion investment firm known for deals like the takeovers of Neiman Marcus and J. Crew. The two worked together from 2014 to 2015 trying to identify data analytics companies to invest in.
But last summer, Mr. Pratt a former consultant who helped found the consulting arm of the Indian technology giant Infosys took the position as global leader of Watson for IBM Global Business Services unit.
It’s a division for which IBM has held lofty hopes, committing some 2,000 employees to help corporate clients use advanced computer intelligence to analyze data in fields as diverse as health care and commerce.
Now, Mr. Pratt is working with TPG Growth, which has struck smaller but prominent investments in the likes of Uber and Airbnb. To Bill McGlashan, the head of TPG Growth, Noodle represents the chance to finally invest in a data analytics company, after having spent years looking at existing service providers like Palantir.
“We have looked at every player in the space,” he said in a phone interview. “But we never got comfortable investing in any of them.”
Incubating a new business is nothing new to TPG Growth. It has helped give birth to start-ups across different industries, including those as far afield as movies, in the form of the Hollywood studio STX.
Mr. McGlashan conceded that it took a lot of work to get Mr. Pratt to leave his prestigious and “well-compensated” position as the head of IBM Watson.
But for Mr. Pratt, leaving to start Noodle meant being able to build a new analytics and A.I. business from the ground up. The company will be based in San Francisco and Bangalore, relying on teams around the world to handle workloads.
“We’re going to have a work force around the world that’s optimized for speed and cost,” he said.
Other founders of the start-up include Matt Denesuk, who was previously the chief data science officer for General Electric’s G.E. Digital unit; Raj Joshi, who was the senior executive vice president of professional services at MicroStrategy; and Ted Gaubert, who previously worked with Mr. Pratt at Infosys Consulting as chief technology officer.
Mr. McGlashan of TPG Growth said that his firm planned to make full use of Noodle’s services, offering the start-up as an option for its portfolio companies.
Mr. Pratt spoke positively about his former employer, but he seemed ready to do battle all the same.
“This is an existential threat to larger enterprises,” Mr. Pratt said. “The people who do it first will have an exceptional advantage over laggards.”
Date: March 14, 2016