On our latest investment: Building the Future, Together

It was 8 years ago now that we launched Signal AI to take the world’s data, apply machine learning and turn it into actionable insights for business leaders to make the best possible decisions in protecting their reputation, spotting risks early and getting ahead of missed opportunities. We’re now a global company with over 700 clients, 200 colleagues, offices in London, NYC and Hong Kong. It has been quite a journey.

With the emergence of the global pandemic, widespread social protest over equality and race, and the climate emergency, these past two years have been unlike any other. At Signal AI we remained agile to events, training the platform’s first disease topic, and creating a free daily bulletin service to help leaders better understand the overwhelming load of information that impacted their business. With these tectonic shifts under almost every societal pillar, Signal AI’s mission to aggregate the world’s information and transform decision making for business leaders has never been more critical. 

In this climate, today I am thrilled to be able to share the news that we have raised our Series D round; a $50m funding injection that brings our total investment to over $100m. This round was led by Highland Europe with abrdn (formally Aberdeen Investments) in the round. We very much look forward to working with them both. We are also grateful to our existing investors including amongst others Redline, MMC, Hearst and Guardian Media Group Ventures for their continued faith in the vision of the business. 

For those that don’t know what we do, Signal AI’s decision augmentation solution uses the world’s news, broadcast, blog and regulatory data to understand a decision maker or business’ context and extracts critical knowledge from these diverse sources. Our AI platform then delivers relevant knowledge through a SaaS interface, real-time alerts, interactive dashboards and an API suite to help decision makers across a range of industries make informed and confident decisions. Our data and insights are currently delivered to over 40% of the Fortune 500, a huge validation of the daily value we are able to deliver.

Our clients include a G7 Government who uses Signal AI to understand drivers for vaccine hesitancy, Deloitte who use our platform to monitor changing policy and regulation trends to better advise clients, one of the world’s largest FMCG who uses our technology to track the perception and risks in thousands of ingredients, and one of the FAANG who uses Signal AI to measure trust, perception and emerging reputational risk.

So what next, what will this latest investment power? 

We plan to use this new funding to invest in further world class R&D with a huge push on hiring ML and AI engineering talent. We believe we are one of the hottest European AI companies to work for and want to build on that success, as we continue to scale our operations in the States. Our commitment to R&D is and always has been at the heart of what we do and putting this investment into innovation is key to fulfilling our vision.

The other significant investment focus is into our tremendous US team, we are committed to further supercharging our investment in this market to help us scale even further.  We are seeing huge US growth and we want to make sure we have the best possible team to service that demand and to work with even more of the world’s biggest companies.

The opportunity is huge, with Gartner predicting that by 2030, Decision Augmentation will surpass all other types of AI initiatives to account for 44% of the global AI-derived business value. As the responsibilities of business leaders continue to increase, and the number of key stakeholders continues to grow, business leaders need more help than ever to make informed and confident decisions. 

It would not be a funding announcement without a list of thank yous!  The past couple of years have been challenging on every level for us all. To all of those that have joined and championed the Signal AI journey along the way, you all know who you are, thank you. To all of the Signal AI team, past and present, we have built this success together,  you inspire me everyday, so please keep on and thank you! And to all of our customers and broader stakeholders who continue to help us build a decision augmentation platform for the future that truly delivers critical insight, thank you! We look forward to making you all proud, and building this exciting future, together.