Today we’re excited to announce that, with participation from Albion and HSBC, Dawn has led a $20m Series B round into Quantexa. Here’s why.

In recent years there have been important advances in data analytics. It has become increasingly easy to get data out of silos and into centralised repositories where it has value. At the same time, the growth of compute capacity and cloud-based SaaS has enabled many data-driven processes to be automated — a development that has been accelerated through robotic process automation (RPA).

Following access and computing, the next, more challenging phase is to make the data itself more valuable — from enriching (can gaps be filled in with internal and third-party data to produce a more complete record?) to contextualising (how do these data assets relate to one another? what further information can be extracted based on the context of the data?).

Organisations that do this successfully will gain better insight into their customers and their business, and they’ll lower their costs through increased automation. So how does Quantexa help with all this?

Let’s say you’ve interacted with a company across multiple channels, and given slightly different information each time (maybe you’ve signed up with multiple email addresses, or perhaps your name’s been entered in different formats for an offline vs online transaction). Clearly, it’s immensely valuable for the company to have a single view of you as a customer.

Quantexa links up all the data relating to you into a single record, even if there is poor/missing data — the gaps are supplemented from both internal and external sources. The result is an enriched picture which gives the business true insight into you as a customer.

The second main area that Quantexa helps tackle is context: now that we have a more complete picture of our entities in isolation, how do they relate to one another?

Quantexa uses a graph network to uncover connections. Taking our example above: once the business understands how you’ve transacted with them in the past, they want to see e.g. if you interact with other entities in the system, what are typical behaviours, and what all this suggests about your relationship with those other entities. From such clues Quantexa could infer that two people are married even if they don’t have the same surname or postal address in the system.

Especially challenging in all this is linking up data where there’s not an exact correlation. Quantexa is highly effective at ‘fuzzy matching’, while also minimising the number of false positives.

Moreover, a human is able to see the logic behind why Quantexa has flagged e.g. an insurance claim as suspicious—a key differentiator from the common ‘black box’ approach. And as an analyst tags entities on the network, the system learns and improves, unlocking even greater insight.

Detecting financial crime and monitoring human trafficking are just two examples of where such network analytics provides huge value. Quantexa is also already being used in B2B sales prospecting, where by highlighting relevant, non-obvious connections it enables salespeople to be more effective in reaching the right decision makers.

For common use cases, Quantexa offers ready-made analytical frameworks. But customers may well want to run their own models on the data, and here the open architecture means they can integrate whatever they like into their workflow. As investors, we’re excited by the company’s ability to scale rapidly thanks to its platform approach. And any model will be much more effective when it’s working off the high-quality, contextualised data that Quantexa produces.

Quantexa is well placed for the next leap forward in the data revolution: automated AI decisioning. Throughout our society, algorithms will increasingly be churning through vast quantities of data and determining outcomes. (Read Homo Deus if you’re not convinced.)

We believe that, by unlocking value from vast amounts of data and making AI much more effective, Quantexa has a major part to play in that story.

Data-driven and automated—that’s the way the world is going, and Quantexa is helping it get there. Vish and Imam have assembled a first-rate team, and we’re thrilled to support them as they continue to scale Quantexa into a global leader.