AI-powered financial research platform Sentieo nabs $20M

Sentieo, a financial and corporate research platform provider, today announced it has raised $20 million in a series B round led by Ten Coves Capital. Sentieo says it will use the funds to expand its market reach as it grows its workforce.

Investors and corporations were already looking for opportunities to gain a competitive edge when the pandemic hit. By 2025, more than 75% of venture capital and early-stage investor executive reviews will be informed by AI and data analytics, according to a Gartner whitepaper. But as remote work became the norm last year, standalone investment research solutions hindered analysts’ ability to work collaboratively.

Sentieo aims to solve this with a dashboard that brings various financial research tools onto a single, AI-supported platform. A financial and corporate research platform for executives, investment analysts, and researchers, Sentieo provides a cloud-based workflow for financial document search, market and alternative data, modeling, and analytics, supported by a holistic research management system.

Sentieo’s AI-driven document search component can sift through millions of documents by applying natural language processing and linguistic algorithms. Meanwhile, the company’s integrated equity data terminal offers historical financial and consensus data, as well as modeling tools, mergers and acquisitions data, stock pricing, charts, public and private comparables, filings, transcripts, news, and profiles for over 980,000 private companies.

Sentieo also leverages AI for automated document summarization, categorization, and sentiment analysis and to extract KPIs and create models from filings, according to CEO David Lichtblau. “With the incredible adoption of the Sentieo platform, it is clear we are experiencing a massive shift in how financial and corporate research is executed,” Lichtblau said in a press release. “We see a huge opportunity to replace hard-to-use and expensive point solutions that slow down the journey to uncover competitive insights.”

AI-powered financial research

As the Gartner report points out, current technology is capable of providing insights into customer desires and predicting future behavior. Unique profiles can be built with little to no human input and further developed via natural language processing AI that can determine qualities about a person from real-time or audio recordings. While this technology is now used primarily for marketing and sales purposes, by 2025 investment organizations will be leveraging it to determine which leadership teams are most likely to succeed.

One venture capital firm — San Francisco, California-based Signalfire — is already using a proprietary platform called Beacon to track the performance of more than 6 million companies. At a cost of over $10 million per year, the platform draws on 10 million data sources, including academic publications, patent registries, open source contributions, regulatory filings, company webpages, sales data, social networks, and even raw credit card data. Companies that are outperforming are flagged up on a dashboard, ostensibly allowing Signalfire to see deals before traditional venture firms do.

Sentieo claims to have had a banner year, racking up “record” revenue in 2020. The company says more than 1,000 customers — including 800 institutional investment firms and Fortune 500 corporations — now use its platform, among them Schroders, Magellan Asset Management, and Roivant Sciences.

Sentieo’s latest funding round had participation from existing investors Centana Growth Partners and Studio Management. It brings the company’s total raised to date to $62 million.