AlphaSense, an European Innovation Council pilot's funded artificial intelligence (AI) platform, has secured $50 million in a Series B funding round led by Innovation Endeavors. Other investors in the funding round include Soros Fund Management LLC, through its private investment vehicle, and other existing investors. The company was launched in 2011 and has already raised more than $90 million.
Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, and founding Partner of Innovation Endeavors, explained that information is the currency of business today. But data is overwhelming and fragmented. That is where AlphaSense steps in. “We were impressed by the way AlphaSense solves this with its AI and search technology, allowing businesses to proceed with the confidence that they have the right information driving their strategy.”
According to the company, via its semantic search AlphaSense organizes and indexes more than 100 million documents such as broker research, earnings call transcripts, private company data, newspapers, trade journals, as well as internal company data and presentations, to provide business professionals the insights necessary to make critical decisions quickly and confidently. More than fifty percent of the S&P 100 corporations and more than sixty-six percent of the 50 largest global investment firms use the service.
Rick Scanlon, founding Partner at Innovation Endeavors, led the AlphaSense investment and joined the company’s board. Scanlon noted that AlphaSense is a high-growth, product-first company with a highly differentiated AI platform and an exceptional team. “I’m really excited to join the board and I look forward to working with the company as it delivers on its visionary promise of augmented intelligence, or the best of technology and human ingenuity working together.”
AlphaSense said it will use the additional capital to further develop its groundbreaking AI and natural language processing technology, accelerate product development, and drive global expansion of the platform.
“At AlphaSense, we are committed to providing a transformative solution to a problem that affects all large companies across every industry,” said Jack Kokko, CEO and Co-founder of AlphaSense. “We are excited to be backed by Eric Schmidt and the Innovation Endeavors team, and remain focused on helping knowledge workers worldwide acquire critical business insights and data with great speed and confidence.”
The company received a Phase 2 grant from the EIC SME Instrument program in 2015 of 1.816.853 €.
Jack Kokko highlighted that "This grant was very instrumental to our success to date. It helped AlphaSense expand to new markets, broaden our market appeal and enable rapid growth within the EU marketplace. We focused on using the grant funds to invest in our technical infrastructure, incorporate new content sets and add new functionality to our financial search engine."
AlphaSense is a finnish-based company and is the provider of a disruptive Financial Search Engine (FSE) technology used by by the largest, fastest-growing companies in the world. Powered by AI technology and leveraging advances in Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning in particular, AlphaSense is a revolutionary search engine that delivers superior results—helping agile teams make better strategic decisions and gain a competitive edge.
View AlphaSense's information on the EIC SME Instrument data hub.
DISCLAIMER: This information is provided in the interest of knowledge sharing and should not be interpreted as the official view of the European Commission, or any other organisation.