SESAMm, which develops natural language processing (NLP) technology for global investment firms, has raised $37m for its Series B2 funding round.
This capital infusion will help SESAMm expand into the US and Asian markets, as well as bolster its team with hires in its sustainability, technology, sales and marketing teams.
The capital will also be used to support the technology development to generate AI-powered ESG and sentiment analytics.
Deep tech venture capital firm Elaia co-led the funding round with Opera Tech Ventures, the venture arm of BNP Paribas. Other commitments came from asset manager Unigestion, Raiffeisen Bank International’s venture capital entity Elevator Ventures, AFG Partners, CEGEE Capital, and existing backers, including Carlyle and New Alpha Asset Management.
Founded in 2014 by CEO Sylvain Forté, COO Pierre Rinaldi, and CTO Florian Aubry, SESAMm claims to be one of the fastest-growing NLP analytics data providers. Its clients include private equity firms, hedge funds and other asset management companies, as well as corporations of all sizes.
Speaking on the funding round, SESAMm CEO and co-founder Sylvain Forté said, “We are happy and grateful to close this €35 million Series B2 round to continue our growth journey and expand to new international markets such as Singapore.
“Raising a significant amount during challenging market conditions highlights the relevancy of SESAMm’s focus on two key trends: AI and sustainability. In turn, these tools enable organisations to make better decisions and fill the data gaps, particularly in ESG, on both public and private companies.”
SESAMm boasts a data lake of over 20 billion articles and grows this by 20% each year. The data lake provides it with datasets and NLP capabilities to generate analytics for various use cases. These include controversy detection, ESG and SDG sentiment scores, private equity due diligence, suppliers monitoring, and more.
Opera Tech Ventures managing director Thibaut Schlaeppi added, “In a context where it is increasingly critical for decision makers to feed their assessments with deeper data points, we found SESAMm’s product very relevant to help identify, filter out, weigh and report key data insights on companies ranging from small private firms to large corporations. We have found deep common ground with the team and are very proud to support SESAMm in its journey onward.”
With the close of the investment, SESAMm has raised a total of €50m in funding.
RegTech company Aveni recently released a report explaining why NLP processes need to have human-in-the-loop to really succeed.
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