British Startup Quantexa is an enterprise platform that employs AI and data analytics to combat money laundering and fraud, and has long been naming itself.
Today, the company said it raised $175 million new to double its business and move deeper into another hot area. It helps you understand data and build and run AI services with a variety of silos.
Series F will significantly increase Quantexa from its $2.6 billion postmoney ($1.8 billion in 2023). Teacher Venture Growth (TVG), a division of the Ontario Teacher Pension System in Canada. Startups have raised just under $550 million so far for each Pitchbook.
Funds are coming at a flashy moment for the 9-year-old startup. The company says it has “thousands of users” on its platform, and its list of enterprise customers includes Prudential, Vodafone, the UK government, HSBC, ABN-Amro and Accenture. Last year, license revenues rose 40%, and now there are 16 offices around the world, with around 800 employees.
This is also a key moment in the enterprise space. Both private and public sector organizations are pushing for adoption of more AI services, hoping to reduce costs, speed up the way people work, and take on a new kind of job.
However, there is a small problem. Often, these organizations sit in huge horde of legacy that need to be identified and sorted to train and execute those new services.
Quantexa’s tools were built to tap table tennis with unstructured data to support anti-money laundering efforts, but the tool has proven to be equally useful for curating data in AI applications. Startups have been building the latter business for several years now, and now there is a huge demand for AI, which has led to a growing focus for the company.
“For AI technology to work, you need to get the data correctly. You need to be able to trust it. You need to be able to curate it. That’s what we do,” Vishal Maria, founder and CEO of the company, said in an interview.
Quantexa continues to aim for many businesses in the identification of money laundering and fraud, and hopes to continue growing in its field while working to expand its presence in a wider range of AI projects.
In line with these goals, Quantexa said it would “quickly track” its partnership with Microsoft in November. The startup will build AI-powered workloads for the Microsoft Fabric Data Analytics platform and build anti-money laundering solutions for intermediate banks in the US market distributed through the Azure Marketplace.
For businesses using Databricks, Marria said the startup plans to do more work in that environment. It plans to use Quantexa’s technology to organize billions of data records to build generic AI apps and build partnerships between companies to deliver power.
The startup also wants to expand its public sector reach. In particular, there will be a growing dedicated business unit that will help government agencies build AI services using “structured, unstructured data.”
Maria did not comment on the work Quantexa is doing around a major government AI push (called “plans of change”), but he noted that the company is involved in several projects beyond the publicly available projects (this anti-fraud project was taken up by the Cabinet Office).
It has driven this particular round in addition to its traction, and it is to persuade growth that is compelling growth at a time when there are many liquidity.
“Vish himself is very extraordinary,” said Avid Larizadeh Duggan, senior MD who runs TVG at EMEA. “He’s a visionary founder, but he’s also a magnet of talent surrounded by exceptional people. Selling to regulated industries is not easy. You can say he’s incredibly personality, but you know what he’s talking about. Behind that, he has a clear understanding of his customers and products. All of these attributes are very important when investing, but for me, when the sand changes so quickly, it feels even more important.”
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